Some Days
Some days I love my life.
Some days I hate my life.
But I’m thankful for every day
I receive the gift of having
A life to complain about.
Tag Archives: words
Jumpcuts of Thought
I was flipping through one of my older poetry books—Dreaming of Lemon Trees: Selected Poems (Finishing Line Press, 2019)—and I came upon “Jumpcuts of Thought.” I like the stupid absurdity of it, and I thought I would share the poem, since many people have not read it in book form. It’s also one of the only poems I’ve written that employs the use of rhyme.
Jumpcuts of Thought
Clorox shine
and Rust Belt mine.
Ruddy hue
and Spade gumshoe.
Tootsie Pop
and soiled mop.
J.S. Bach
and Shakur, Tupac.
Codeine high
and ham on rye.
Minnie Mouse
and adobe house.
Petrie dish
and sardine fish.
Rockwell print
and strand of lint.
Ruby Dee
and Wounded Knee.
Swollen lip
and radar blip.
Clark Gable
and Aesop fable.
Toilet seat
and sirloin meat.
Shower stall
and Camus’s The Fall.
Mustard green
and college dean.
Lowell, Mass.
and Namath pass.
The odd pairings
go on and on,
in this celebration of incongruity—
a verbal exercise
to stimulate the mind.
Recovered Words
Last night, in the process of looking for the original wording of a poem I wrote more than fifteen years ago, I discovered a collection of unpublished work stored on an external hard drive. The poems, short stories, essays and short film scripts had been written on two old laptops—a Dell and a Gateway—and they remained unpublished for the simple reason they were unworthy of print. But as I fell into the Word doc rabbit hole, I came across a few items with potential.
One was a poor, unfinished essay with the opening sentence, “Sometimes I wish I could ‘green screen’ my life.” I played with the line spacing and edited the essay into a poem. It’s certainly not the poetry of Whitman, Dickinson, Mary Oliver or Billy Collins, but I am pleased to have revised the words into a finished piece—which is now saved on my current computer for future use.
Green room, green screen by Jared Tarbell via Wikimedia Commons.
Green Screen Poem
Sometimes I wish I could
“green screen” my life—
alter the circumstances,
change the background,
transport myself from
my furnished studio apartment
to a Northern California bungalow.
Employ artifice to shape existence.
But life is a reality show—
just without the scripted confrontations.
And there is no green screen
to fix the disparity between
what I am and what I hope to be.
We achieve our dreams,
continue striving toward them
or give up altogether.
Life provides no special effects
to bend reality to our liking.
©2020 Francis DiClemente
Alphabet Expression: Verbal Juxtapositions
I have completed a new project—a mixed genre book that is a medley of poetry, vocabulary and conceptual art.
I possess an obsession for vocabulary, and I spend time each morning looking up the “Word of the Day” on the following sites: thefreedictionary.com, merriam-webster.com and dictionary.com.
I created Alphabet Expression: Verbal Juxtapositions as word play—an attempt to use unusual word combinations to create new associations and imagery in the mind of the reader/viewer. The word pairings were formed according to alliteration, appearance, randomness, rhyme, sound and similar or opposite meaning.
I hope to publish the work in book form (most likely in a self-published format), and I am also interested in collaborating with a designer or visual artist to develop a selection of large-scale, text-based artwork, using some of the pairings from the book.
Here are some sample combinations. You could call the hybrids “voetry” or “poecabulary.”
Autistic
Artistic
Collision
Collusion
Diffident
Different
Lonely
Lovely
Perfection
Perception
Francis DiClemente 