Mercy! Mercy! That Dang Nabed PERCY!

Anothe rGood Reason for no Day

Another Good Day for no Reason

I have always loved poetry. Kipling is my favorite and then Shel Silverstine and then Dr. Seuss.... The intellectual elite malign rhyme and meter and verse making many low and disparaging comments regarding it. The reason is, in my view, that they can't write it and the best they can manage is prose chopped up in little pieces....when they attempt even that. Not that I would criticize free verse which when done right is every bit as poetic and inspiring as all the rest.....I just hate it when my snotty professorial relatives sit around in the summer at Lake Woe Begone and play their stupid little "Stump the Chump" games designed to show each other how really smart they are. Having to listen to their political views and snide commentary on "Art" and what it constitutes it only adds insult to injury.

My goodness...does that rant ever make me feel better. Ahhhhh, now where was I? Anyway I do not consider myself much of a poet even though I have written it all my life. All my stuff traditionally had meter and rhyme although of late the difficulty of the strucures have become fatiguing and I have gotten lazy. Now what I attempt to do is use chopped up prose to capture the thread of a beautiful thought and then try converting it into a poetic monologue.

Now step one is to come up with a beautiful thought and be patient with me as I explain the process. First I have to be inspired as I was with Karen's poem....She took the word "reason" and wrote the poem below. The initial step in being thus inspired, ie.using a poem for inspiriation, is to explain what it means. This is always high drama because as often as not I don't get it right. I explain the poem and the poet askes me what I was smoking when I read it. My response is "Hey! this is what it translated to in the pea brain of Percy Goodfellow...." Anyway let me now take Karen's poem and explain to my "army of readers" what it means.

On a Good Day for No Reason: The title means that the poet work up feeling good and chose not to analyze it to death...She thanked God and let it go at that

Everything and nothing
resonating in my mind
unfiltered rememberings
of a good and pleasant kind

In the first stanza she relates that her mind was in neutral and good and pleasant thoughts flooded through it....they resonated warmly, unfiltered.

So often it's the trouble
and the torment of the past
which muddles up my thinking
and contrives to last and last

In the second stanza she informs the reader that this is not always the case. Sometimes her thinking is not clear and the fog stays around for awhile.

But today on this good day,
for no reason I can see
contented feelings flutter
in the soul inside of me.

In the thrid stanza she reaffirms that this is not the case at the present, she doesn't know why or reallly seen to care, and basks in a warm glow of contentment.

Now I liked this poem and wrote one of my own inspired by her thoughts, translated into Percy Goodfellow English.

On a Good day for no Reason: I too awakened

Today I went out to the truck feeling good.
I turned the key and the engine sprang to life.
It had a nice rumble that got me to thinking good thoughts;
Not the gut wrenching stuff my nightmares are made of.

I went out to my '46 Studebaker Pickup and cranked the engine. The resonance sounded good and I got to thinking good thoughts instead of bad.

I always try to be a decent fellow but don’t always succeed.
Haunted by insensitive words and acts of spite
I often flash back and stiffen with dread…wincing!
“I hate it when you do that!” my wife says.
But today was not one of those days.

I tried to convince the reader(myself?) that at heart I'm not such a bad fellow even though I am beset at times with the recollection of dark things....That these flash into my mind and I START! and my wife snaps at me, but today that didn't happen.

So you see how a word Karen read in my blog, prompted her to write a poem that captured the "spirit" of her thoughts and that I read her poem and wrote some chopped up stacked prose that said essentially the same thing....filtered through my mind and translated into my words. (See how the flutter of butterfly wings have made their way from Texas to Wisconsin?)

Now unless Karen jumps in here and gets me to spinning in a new direction, I think tomorrow I will show the reader one of two things....Either I will demonstrate that I have some capacity for turning stacked prose into real metered and rhymed poetry or I will take the stacked prose and expand it into what I call a poetic monologue. either exercise should be fun and provide the grist for the next blog.