Intelligence's Vast Bonfires

Intelligence's Vast Bonfires
Lazarus Media. USA.
December, 2012.

It is insufficient either to be the next widget writer, or, at the other extreme, to struggle to please academic champions. Living verse necessarily has to gambol past imaginary hedgehogs chowing on jelly-filled doughnuts, beyond the strictures of high ranking scholastic trolls, and into the rainbow abysses found only in rural, secret places. Successful poetry must simultaneously hamper mundanity and shun the use of thick words.

Within Intelligence's Vast Bonfires, jeremiads sit alongside of celebrations, and announcements of scientific discoveries make friends with samples of more exotic arts. Forays into civilian disobedience are illuminated, here, next to stanzas that toady hegemonic strictures. Praise, flash, and glory are housed, as well, adjacent to the fetid trenches of convergent marketing efforts.

Accordingly, Intelligence's Vast Bonfires concurrently beams worshipful and cheeky, touches on commonplaces as well as on specialized topics, and freely makes use of motes both odd and ordinary. What's more, this compilation makes no apologies, even between the lines, for phrases which strive to be fully corporeal or for literary devices which are functionally more magic than median.

Imaginative writings, despite protests to the contrary, given linguistic limitations, must mirror, at least partially: the social-political places to which their creators have traveled, the interpersonal negotiations in which their creators have involved themselves, and the difficult pecuniary decisions which their creators have made. It remains ineluctable that poetry, including the pieces assembled here, can not otherwise be brought into existence.

Acknowledgements
Foreword
Introduction: Curtaneous
1. Wisdom for Pain
1.1 I've Stopped Believing in Comic Book Heroes
1.2 Clinics Can't Always Amend
1.3 Somewhere In Pittsburgh, I
1.4 Faltering in Ways Uncharted
1.5 Hating Men
1.6 I Talk to the Pain
1.7 Disconsolate
1.8 The Stray in the Dumpster: The Relative Apertures of Aborted Attempts
1.9 Unmade Angel
1.10 Accessing Social Desperation: Here, We Bloom
1.11 Ash upon Ash
1.12 Kissy Kinds of Candy
1.13 Eyelash Slipping
1.14 Can't Nicitate Fast Enough
1.15 Looking Glass: The Costs of Ransoming an Ugly Princess
1.16 Wealth
1.17 Smiler
1.18 Running Ahead of Divas
1.19 Incunabula
1.20 Reverberations
1.21 Rubricing Life
1.22 Metamorphoses Enough for All Her Gatekeepers: Moving from Gifted Child to Muted Woman

2. Relational Imbalances
2.1 Barbacoa on the BBQ
2.2 Launching Space Probes toward the HR Department
2.3 Mutual Spirit Flights
2.4 My Fifty Year-Old Husband's Sprouting
2.5 Goldfish Death
2.6 Crying on Borrowed Time
2.7 Funeral Improvisation
2.8 Tang Rather than Piquant
2.9 Exoskeletal Snacks
2.10 No Stamps Got Lost
2.11 Useless Head Games
2.12 Relative Maternal Pain
2.13 Listed for $100,000
2.14 The Complete Course of Life
2.15 The Girls beneath the Furniture
2.16 Dreaming Insurgence during Social Conflagrations
2.17 Otherwise Strewn with Legends
2.18 I Love You, Generally
2.19 Very Nearly Folly
2.20 The Swank of Rare, White Swans
2.21 Misplaces Axes
2.22 The Best Thing You ever Put Your Lips around

3. Wisdom Sung Sane
3.1 To Bowdlerize
3.2 Plucking
3.3 Power Suits plus Head Scarves' PR
3.4 Carnival Provocations
3.5 Packing for Conferences
3.6 Shucked Beans
3.7 Mommy Woes
3.8 Recollections
3.9 To Eat One More Bouquet of Ethereal Flowers: Doggerel's Flophouse
3.10 Runaway Mama
3.11 Loving Myself Fat
3.12 Thirty-Five
3.13 Bilious Lament: Petulant Words
3.14 Superman's Gift to Lois Lane
3.15 Betsy the Barn Cow
3.16 Their Somewhat Raucous Celebrations
3.17 Deliberate Blossoming
3.18 Emunah (Faith) plus a Little Help
3.19 Giving Generously to Trust
3.20 Cutting between Sheets: Fantastic Solutions to Mundane Problems
3.21 Unveigled among the Rows: Rotations of Moonlit Bleeding
3.22 Safta's Brassiere

4. Literacy Buoys
4.1 Word Worship
4.2 Cobbling Books
4.3 Little Intrusion
4.4 When Impossible to Select among Rivers
4.5 Encircling as Wrapping: Misread Six Autistic Rotating among Angels
4.6 Small Avarice and Munificence
4.7 Nighttime Evils: Mistaken Urban Learnings
4.8 Damages for the Pain: Convergent Media Woes
4.9 That Great, Wonderful Boom
4.10 If Glass, Then Break Down Words
4.11 Telephone Whispers (an Englyn)
4.12 The Resting Places of All of Those Bits
4.13 Prolapsed Intelligence: The Delusion Inherent in Failing to Remember Accurately
4.14 The Scattered Notes of Midlife
4.15 Squandered Moral Collections
4.16 Verbs Hinder
4.17 To be a Midlist Author
4.18 Some Things are Better Left for Orange-Yellow Bellied Fliers
4.19 Watching a Painter
4.20 In the Minds of Guilty Porcupines
4.21 Rearing Related Verse: Tending a Rhetorical Zoo
4.22 Writing's Supersonic Quality

Conclusion: Contemporary Maxims: To Sit Up, Bark, and Then Roll Over
Credits
About the Author