So, to be honest, I am getting a lot of things done around the house and around my brain (the latter being the more difficult of the two things to work with), but still this stay at home with no work does have a way of driving one up a wall. If only those walls didn’t exist, right?
Within those walls time slowly loses meaning, days blend together, hours into hours, minutes into minutes, and then suddenly it’s midnight and you’re wondering what you’ve done besides write another 2k words and did you ever actually respond to that text you meant to?
At least I can cook.
I am doing more reading these days, too, which is nice, and that’s part of what brought my back to reciting poems. This time around I selected five poems that range from the whimsical to the legitimately morbid but who are linked by the common thread of at least being somewhat funny. Some are funny ‘haha,’ and some are funny ‘Doonesbury,’ to use the Bojack Horseman scale of humor.
Whether or not I can actually recite them with any semblance of humor also remains to be seen. Some people think I’m funny. I think.
Guys?
Anyway, we begin with two poems, each on the spectrum of mocking love poems. The first deals against the flowery language used in so many poems that almost drift into melodrama, and provides a successful foil to them. The second, I feel, deals with the complicated feelings often associated with powerful love. The third poem, and the most morbid (with a strong language warning), cuts into the familial unit and hits home now more than ever with the influence family members have on each other. The fourth is purely fun and whimsical, and its reading here should prove that I was never meant to be a voice actor.. The fifth and final poem is written (please read it) and read and as a satire of America both in language and in content.
This series started by doing just some fun reading of the fifth poem with some friends of mine, and it got me thinking how often poetry is relegated to some kind of high art and how unapproachable it may seem. Part of this wanted to challenge that and just have fun with it, hence the more laid-back approach to reading here. Do I pull it off? Eh? But I had fun doing it, and so here we are.
I hope some of these can provide a little break from the drudgery of home-life, or at the very least, help you find the humor in the darkness of the situation we’re all in.
Once again, I have no professional recording equipment nor am I remotely a professional orator. Listen at your own risk.