Insomnia 900k.

dracula checks his e-mail one last time
before flapping into his lead coffin
and slamming the lid shut on the dawn

the boogieman fiddles with his crackling clock radio
trying to find a station that still works
before squeezing himself back under the bed.

the wolfman marks his territory one last time
preparing to wake, a naked civilian once again,
in the wolf cage at the zoo

Look at these Goddamn Olympic Zombies

I deleted my poem about the Olympics because, despite the sincerity of my sentiments (and even the thumbs up from LQ; to whom I recited the work while she baked me a Valentine’s day key lime pie) it was a bad poem, stylistically speaking.  Really bad.  That doesn’t mean, by any stretch of the imagination, that I’m coming to terms with the Olympics.  I’m not.

One thing LQ and I were talking about on Valentine’s day (because we went to her roommate’s burlesque show at the Cafe Cleopatra) was how difficult it still is for a man who wants to wear a dress to go to some places in public.  At Cleopatra there was a man in a dress who would get up on stage between the acts and dance; dance just a little, mind you, with not too flashy steps on the darkened stage, while the next act prepared behind the curtain.

Why the Sherlock Holmes Movie Sucks Ass

When I was a kid I got a really neat gift.  Someone who dug A Study in Scarlet had taken all the evidence described in the story and turned it into a dossier of police files and photographs and physical objects (e.g., a wedding ring in a bag and some poison pills) and so on.  The idea was that, if you were presented will all the evidence of the case, perhaps you, like Sherlock Holmes, could put the facts together and solve the murder.  I got that as a gift and I thought it was cool-o-rama.

The problem with the new Sherlock Holmes movie, the one with Robert Downey Jr. and Jude Law and all of them, is that there is no case to solve.  There is never any sense of things coming together.  In a good murder mystery you ought to be guessing the whole time who done it and being given false leads and wrong clues and you should feel your mind working on the case, trying to beat Holmes to the solution.

But, obviously the people who wrote/directed this movie are a bunch of mental pipsqueaks who couldn’t put together a good murder mystery if they tried (and it doesn’t appear that they did try); favouring instead to excite us with extended set pieces where lots of things go boom.  There is a 30 second bit at the end where Holmes explains to the villain how he figured out the mysterious parts of the mystery, but it's not like anyone in the audience has an honest chance to guess these things because we are never allowed to know the dimensions of the world in which Holmes lives—what is technologically possible and what is not—it's a shame, really, because a movie that actually had a plot and also wicked CGI would really be something.  Here, though, the sense of mystery is secondary to the action.  If the character were named something other than Holmes then it would probably never occur to anyone that this was a mystery film.

I guess it's okay because I didn’t waste any money on this film, preferring instead to download it "illegally".  It is my sincere hope that by watching as many of these bloated budget films on a lap top via a streaming site or via a bittorrent download, I can do my part to drive Hollywood out of business and usher in a world where people make small inexpensive films that have great plots…in fact, I should like to see the film industry go so broke that they can't even afford cameras and the only way that anyone can afford to make a movie is to rent out a hall and then build a bunch of flimsy sets and have people pay a pittance to come and see the actors performing the film live on a kind of elevated platform in front of the audience.  They'd be so broke, in fact that instead of having edited cuts between scenes they'd have to just lower a big piece of cloth and then quickly move everything around behind the cloth to set up the next sequence.

insomnia 44

I was still standing around on the cold mud
when the sun came up under my feet
and lifted me into the sky

my toes dug into the smouldering brow of Helios
and I perched there like a crow on a wheel

I could see ten thousand miles in every direction
and everything below me was hard and white

and the tree lines were brown shivering skeletons
stitching up the edges of the snowy fields

but I was warm with the sun as my elevator
and the clouds turned to steam as I passed through them
on my way to the stars