I suppose your dad met mine at the end that brightly lit tunnel on the other side of the river with a bottle of oak aged twelve year malt in his hand and they laughed at the irony of surviving the war all that camaraderie and bleeding mud to die in such banality as snowstorms and disease
The most common type of conflict involves the following:
Man vs. his environment
Man vs. God
Man vs. the supernatural
Etc.
In the end it’s all about the voice over
Or it happens when you’re playing red rover
Or you’re looking for a four-leaf clover
That you over looked
Before
Your dad died and mine too
Did it occur to either of them that he should have played less or more?
Here is a history of the modern feminist movement
Burn chicka Burn chicka burn burn burn
The hills are alive
With the sound of post-modern progress
An endless broadcast of the commodification of emotion
A twenty-first century potion
Better than anti-wrinkle lotion
Or slant rhyme
I meant to say scant rhyme and
I worry about the encroachment of time
And soil erosion
We are all buried in a plot
So much for original thought
How do you hold a moonbeam in your hand?
Our stories have been lost to ubiquity
A result of the televised expression of transparency
There’s no business like show business
Who doesn’t want to know what love is?
Here is a history of the sexual revolution
Boom chicka Boom chicka boom boom boom
Oh Canada
When the basics of conflict have been established tension must build
Through cycles of complication crisis and resolution
All in order to provide an answer to the major dramatic question when the anguished main character either resolves his/her internal conflict or is destroyed by it
Etc.
Why I oughta
Suspect everything except myself
There things to look forward to:
1. A plot that is not character driven
2. A series of implausible events that leads to instant redemption
3. A series of implausible events that leads to instant redemption and tastes less plastic than a microwave meal
We’re moving at the speed of cliché
La curcaracha shall inherit the earth
So let us get up early to the vineyards
Let us see if the vines flourish
Whether the tender grape appear
Today we will play the fool
Tomorrow we will play hardball
After that we will come to terms with dramatic structure
Too much language to recover heart
Brand identity over mind over matter
Oh the temptation of redemption in a cup
Stop throwing caution to the wind
There’s a little white duck sitting in the water
A little white duck doing what he oughta
Public memory is being privatized
This grief and crazy feeling we took away from our dads has made us what we are
Talent being what it is my huckleberry friend at least they gave us something to cry about
And a world where we could have anything sugar coated or salty
Every casket smells of the wine it contains
(from 2005 CBC poetry face-off)
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Poesy Posted By: NJ Cullen
