My good friend Ryan Mayers sent me a scorecard that I kept when he, Donnie Sabs and I took in a Cubs game a couple of seasons ago. My scorecards are usually a mess, and this was no different – a mix of hieroglyphs, scribbles and meaningless notes that only I could understand. Reading one from two-years ago was a particularly entertaining exercise, and it gave life to the following poem.

SCORECARD


The psychic in the bleachers calls a leadoff homerun
because of the wind and the hitter’s hot streak.
She twinkles her nose like a cartoon witch
and spooks her friends. In the second, a man
with a red foam finger misses the mustard on his chin.
Clouds look like dolphins in the third. A kid points this out
to his father walking back from the john. In the fourth,
fans wave the runner home on a two-out hit.
He’s out by a foot. It’s our fault when the manager gets tossed.
A foul pop in the fifth becomes a struggle for turf.
Flying popcorn. An elbow to the eye. In the sixth,
we anticipate the ritual of the mound trot,
the pitching change. When last call
and the seventh-inning stretch collide, my friend recalls
what Ken Burns said – that Jesus died in the on deck circle.
The sun ducks away long enough in the eighth to lose ourselves
in the slow loft of the wrong team’s deep fly. That’s when
dolphin clouds turn into whales, the sky opens with a quick
sad rain. The last rally fades in the ninth.
The ladies one row ahead cheer for their boys
like Little League moms. All claps and first names.

A few weeks ago I had the absolute pleasure of sitting down with Portland icon Viva Las Vegas, whose new book, MAGIC GARDENS, is about to be released by Portland-based Dame Rocket Press.

If you don’t know about Viva, her story is truly an amazing one: highly gifted and intelligent Midwestern girl goes off to the Ivy League, studies anthropology, picks up five languages, falls in love with the idea of stripping, moves to Portland, becomes the face and voice advocating stripper rights, locks herself away to write a book, finds a publisher, develops breast cancer, beats the cancer, returns to the stage, and has the book published. She’s a great writer and a fantastic conversation, and I encourage you to check out our interview.

This poem’s been vexing me since May 13, 2002, when I pulled an article out of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel with the same title. I can’t find the article now – it’s in a journal somewhere. And my attempts to find the story online yielded the this.

This latest approach is fairly simple: a dead couple having an argument.


COUPLE EMBRACE IN TRAIN’S PATH


There we are. See, a hand, a lip, one thousand bones
scattered the moment we squeezed shut our eyes.

You’d like to head back? Fine. Go ahead. Seep
into your sister’s dream while she sleeps in your bed.
Visit my father’s mourning couch, the remote like a crest
in his lap.

I won’t be at the funeral. They can bury us however they want.
I’d rather not float close to the ground, buzz someone’s leg,
have them think I’m there.

The moral? There is none, just the tracks that led us here.
Kids-gone-bad type PSAs playing in a loop
against dim afternoon health class light. A film

in the Say No to Drugs series, still-shots from prom,
my hand around the mark in your arm you wanted to hide.

We were never good kids. Like anyone else
in that shit town we finally left. There was never enough
to keep us from the junk under Jones Bridge.

You’re the one who talked about hopping a train, riding
one long ride west. You said you didn’t care
where we got. Just that we got. I simply said

there was no use getting anywhere. We’d still be stuck
in these frames. And you agreed.

Let’s break the speed of light tonight. See what it’s like
drifting into stars. Find a planet with an opposite pull.
I told you I’d give you all of this. Why so afraid?

I’ll be using the blog space on occasion to post professional articles related to branding, marketing communications, and business messaging. If you’ve come here from theBreakerboy.com, welcome.

I love working with graphic designers for any number of reasons. Their ability to see and translate the world into visual messages and metaphors astounds me. I experienced this recently working with Beth Ford of Glib Communications. We partnered on a messaging and branding project for a growing IT firm. The goal was to keep things minimal, evocative, and light-hearted. Instead of writing dissertations on how they help relieve the frustration of working on a dying machine, we let Beth’s design do most of the talking – a man with his head crashed between two monitors, for instance.

I bring this up because, unlike the IT firm, many micro businesses and sole proprietors are finding it difficult to bring both a writer and a designer in on their projects. And while I love when the phone rings, I’m aware that design is often the default, since the right graphics and images will more often than not stop people in their tracks.

When choosing to allocate your marketing budget toward hiring a designer, it’s crucial that you as the client hone in on your words, to make sure the project is as successful as possible.

“CAN YOU WRITE IT FOR ME?”

Most designers I know secretly cringe when asked the above question. It’s not that they can’t handle it; it’s just that writing moves them out of a place of strength (design) and into an area where, while most likely competent, they’re not always completely confident.

Why do clients wind up asking their designer to pitch in on the words? Often they run into walls around creating “the right words”. Walls come in all shapes and sizes: not enough time, perceived lack of ability, old fears, etc. I’ve had naturopathic doctors, lawyers and architects tell me they still can’t get over negative feedback they received on an essay they wrote in junior high.

The client’s inability to create the words in a prompt fashion sends a ripple through the project. Their inclination is to turn to the designer. Editing and review soon becomes tag line brainstorms and creation, which becomes full pages of content. This can put the designer in a tough spot of having to decide how much time they can devote to writing that stretches beyond the scope of their original agreement.

While the businessperson in me likes to say, “I’ll take care of it,” the writer in me is more inclined offer some tips and tools to help people get started.

(more…)

The following comes from Read Write Poem’s prompt #87, working with vowel sounds. I decided to work with “A”.

Avenue A was the first place I’d look for Tina
when she disappeared. It wasn’t anything psychic.
I knew her haunts by the way
she’d crawl around the parquet floor scrawling loops
with bisecting pens, muttering Sweet Jesus
what will our Christian soldiers do now that the war
has wound to a halt?

Starting at the back of Alphabet City
she’d head north where St. Al’s parish was a shadow
behind canopies, its towers
pointing like missalettes at God.
There, the patron saint of Gaston Isles would hang
her wine drunk hair from the tallest perch
until all the birds came back.