How come I'd look silly if I wore
a cyclist outfit like these cyclists at the park?
It's not something I could get away with.

When I wore my JROTC uniform in high school,
the teacher sent me out of class
because the other students were laughing so hard.

I broke the record for the mile run,
and brought our school to best in state
through captaining the track team—

Though I never heard the end of jokes
about having to wear a tank top and short pants.
And the tuxedo I wore at my wedding...

Now I'm alone, sitting at a picnic table
next to a seventeen year old Mexican with eight kids
listening to him watch reruns of Victorious on his portable Nickelodeon.

Personally I think all cyclist look silly.

"Inanibility", nice new word, and yes, I think it comes to us all if we live long enough...of course some of us have to live longer than others though

Dale

I have a lot of inane abilities.

Rowens, I agree with your thesis on the abusurdity of uniforms. I would not be caught dead in one of those bicyclists outfits. They are like wearing a Devo hat and a woman's leotard that has a stuffed Mickey Mouse sown into the crotch!

I liked the poem alot and related to it from the first stanza to the penultimate one. However, that last stanza fell apart for me. 'Victorious' on Nickelodeon is unrelatable; probably 9 out of 10 never heard of it. It may be a hispanic show, but the reference to the Mexican teen and kids is out of place with the piece as well. You, at home, watching Star Trek, fanatasizing to be Captain Kirk, or someother highly familiar show with a crazy uniform woven into the fabric of it, would work much better in my view.

What you say is true. My only excuse would be that stanza's being out of place and inane in itself. Well, I have other excuses. My poems do fall apart a lot. It's part of my experience with writing poems. Sometimes I don't want them to fall apart, yet they do. Sometimes I want them to fall apart, and they do; or they don't. I could go on talking and talking about all my personal views on poetry, and my poetry in general, but not right now. But that's the beauty of posting in Miscellaneous or the Pig's Arse. All discussion is welcome. Tell what you don't like, what you do like, and do it anyway you want. I like that. You can sometimes even change the subject, which I like to do. Then somehow bring it all back. Well, that's me.

But to bring it back to the poem, aside from me throwing things in to stretch the fabric of the realm the poem exists in, throwing in The Noid, for instance; well that's something that happens in my casual day to day experience, so I figure it has a place in my poetry. It might make my poetry bad. Or hurt the poem....Well, back to this poem. If I needed to make sense out of the last stanza, it would be be saying that, at least where I'm currently living, people in their teens and throughout their twenties and thirties seem to spend just as much time watching Nickelodeon and Cartoon Network as their kids. More even, since when their kids are off at school, they sit and watch these shows.

Your assessment of that last stanza is important. And of course no one from where I'm from will read my poetry. Though they will read poems like this that they can relate to.

Well, you do have an ellipsis there indicating omission and there's nothing wrong with a stream of consciousness...

<8__}-----
Lone laboratory rat
in cold steel cage,
treads a wheel
roaming nowhere-
lost in the maze.

Maybe if I hadn't wasted so much time with these foolish activities, wearing those embarrassing outfits, I'd have had time to knock up a lot of young girls and sit around the park with a portable nickelodeon.

Not that any of this really happened. Not to me anyway.

(09-13-2013, 04:23 AM)rowens Wrote:  Maybe if I hadn't wasted so much time with these foolish activities, wearing those embarrassing outfits, I'd have had time to knock up a lot of young girls and sit around the park with a portable nickelodeon.

Not that any of this really happened. Not to me anyway.

No uniforms, where's the discipline in that?

I have no discipline. I just shoot wild west style till the bullet holes appear to form something. What's that called when you see faces and animals and other things in walls and oil stains and stuff?

(09-13-2013, 04:00 AM)ChristopherSea Wrote:  Well, you do have an ellipsis there indicating omission and there's nothing wrong with a stream of consciousness...

<8__}-----
Lone laboratory rat
in cold steel cage,
treads a wheel
roaming nowhere-
lost in the maze.

(09-13-2013, 05:02 AM)rowens Wrote:  I have no discipline. I just shoot wild west style till the bullet holes appear to form something. What's that called when you see faces and animals and other things in walls and oil stains and stuff?

Do you see my rat above? He's red now.

No. But I can almost smell it.

I see an ice cream cone with two scoops, an underlining line, and then Pinocchio.

(09-13-2013, 08:15 AM)rowens Wrote:  I see an ice cream cone with two scoops, an underlining line, and then Pinocchio.

Hey, I invented that one! Well, back to the drawing board and my rat poem...