Tom Lyford has original poetry books and memoirs for sale on-line, and offers poetry readings and workshops in northern New England...
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DUZ SPELENG REELIE MATUR MUTCH?

5/28/2010

3 Comments

 
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The following is a small clip from my memoir, WORK AVERSION TRAUMA: A Lifetime of Suffering. Near the end of my thirty-four-year teaching career, you could say I was getting a tad disappointed in the way things were going...



And meanwhile, the miracle of word processing had arrived, making writing easier and rendering everybody’s writing equally neat. Spell-checking applications were now giving us papers free of misspellings for the first time in history. Imagine how good that made everybody feel.

But… things are not always as they seem.

“Very neat paper here, Billy, but there
are some problems. There’s something wrong with some of these sentences. They aren’t making sense…”

“No way! Nothing showed up when I
spell-checked it, and the grammar-checker didn’t turn anything up either, so it’s gotta be OK.”

“The checkers don’t pick up
everything.”

“Oh? And you
do, I suppose? Wow. Oh, I see:  you’re way smarter than Microsoft! What software have you marketed lately, Mr. L?”

“Trust me. There are problems here. Let me read this to you out loud. I think you’ll see what I mean.”

“
Doubt it! And I ain’t doing it over again. The spell-checker accepted it.”

“OK. But… take this sentence right here, for example: ‘I
raped myself in the towel.’ You see what I’m…”

“Hey! I never said
that! Geez! What’re you talkin’ about?!”

“Well… that’s what it says right there:
r-a-p-e-d…”

“
Wrapped! I never said 'raped!' I wouldn’t say…”

“No, '
wrapped' begins with a w… and has two p’s…”

“Well…
that’s stupid!”

“And see, back here in the previous paragraph, you’re saying right here… ‘My buddies and I drove down to the
pubic beach to check things out.’”

“
Public beach! PUBLIC! Not… what you said!"

“But there’s a letter
l in public. Leave it out and public becomes pubic…”

“Well
I didn’t do that! The computer did it! The spell-checker did it!”

“I thought
you wrote this paper.”

“I
did! But when I ran spell-check, it turned out a crapload of words came up spelled wrong! So anyway, then spell-check gave me this whole big list to choose from!”

“Easy, Billy.
So. You think you might’ve chosen the wrong word from the list?”

“Well, what if I
did! So what! How the hell am I supposed to know which one to pick, huh? It’s like a lottery! They all look alike!”

“Listen, I think we need to go over a couple of simple spelling rules...”

“Well
I don’t need to! That’s the computer’s job! Not mine! And if the computer don’t know how to spell anything, then how do you expect me to? Spelling sucks! This friggin’ CLASS sucks if you really wanna know the truth! You suck for giving us these stupid assignments! And I ain’t doing it over again either! The computer accepted it, so you should too! So if it ain’t good enough for you, flunk me! See if I care!”

It was becoming obvious that Billy wasn’t feeling very good about himself at this point.

“Well, that’s your choice. If you’re content with passing in a story about you
raping yourself on the pubic beach…”

“I
TOLD you I never SAID that! …All right! Hey… you know what?That’s it! I am so out of here!”
   

And so am
I, I thought to myself after the door slammed behind him… so am I.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

AMERICAN DREAM -- A TEACHER LOOKS BACK… by Tom Lyford

hi skool sux! the classez bite!
to dum to reed, to dum to rite
to hammerd eatch and evry nite,
i’m tellin ya! (yo! got a lite?)

teacherz blow! there all a dink!
yore not aloud to smoake (or drink!) 
least  wayz (hah hah! ) that’s whut THEY think!
my wokman playz wial i lip-sink…

the texbooks suk, they bite the bag,
like, duh! i don’t DO  hoamwerk, fag!
chil out! whut R you, on the rag?
(aw, I just roald my last zigzag!)

hang out all day at skool with frenz,
blow spitbalz out of hollo penz
& chek out all the gurlz reer inz…
score doap with stolin fivez & tenz

so how come  all this time we spend
in studdy hallz, lokt up & pennd?
they just won reezon we atend!
that free duhlpoamuh at the ind!!!

3 Comments

THE HEAVY-HANDED PURITAN INFLUENCE ON THIS NEW ENGLAND BABY BOOMER...

5/26/2010

2 Comments

 
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Ah yes... I have been cursed since birth (1946!) by this all-pervasive, guilt-operated Control Mechanism. Beneath the blistering suns of YOUTH, I've worn the black, itchy woolens of Puritan Ethics until my skin's broken out in terminal hives! Even now, at age sixty-three, I find myself having to consciously perform the daily ritual of tearing off the sable Hawthornian tunic that re-grows onto my back during the night like Prometheus's heart (or was it his liver..." I forget.) and hurling it petulantly back to the skies!  I envy Modern Youth's unconscious and unfettered acceptance of their bodies and the naturalness of their own sexuality (but that's all I envy them.) Puritanism is in my genes (and my jeans!).


I even blame the fact that I seem incapable of writing Fiction on... you guessed it-- Puritanism. See, fiction, by definition, is 'telling lies.' Oh, I know there's Truth in Fiction. And having been a pathological liar in my youth, you'd think I could spin off novels and short stories like a factory conveyor belt. But somehow, at this age, when I embark on a fictional endeavor... a deep voice from somewhere in my psyche intones, "Now Tommy... is this the
truth? Or are you just 'telling stories' again? Shame on you! Now... you know better than that, Tommy. You have perfectly good true stories to tell... don't you!"


God, I wish somebody'd create a Viagra for Puritanically-impotent fiction writers... 


Well... I tell you what. After I finish this second memoir I'm working on, (due out in a month or two... if not by August 1st, then by Christmas for sure {damn... I am so
shameless!}) I am going to force myself to write something fictional! A short story at least! But in the meantime I'm wrestling with this account of several of my youthful misadventures as a child of the 1950's... me as the minion of my own y-chromosomes (the y-chromosomes made me do it, I tells ya!). (Told you I was a pathological liar... back then).


The following is an excerpt from one of those (true... I swear!) stories (soon to be published {oh, did I already tell you that? Anyway, stay tuned...}). As in many of the memories included in the collection... I dealt a lot with Old People back then (yeah, yeah... I know-- I AM an Old People now... what goes around, comes around, etc., etc. I get it, OK?). Old people can sometimes be scary to tots, you may recall. The Oldster in this account happens to be my grandfather, Leon T. Craig, a high-ranking official in the self-appointed Puritan Gestapo...


                                                     ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

My first actual memory of the man? Baggy bib-overalls, straw hat, and workboots. Up there on a rickety stepladder hammering nails into something. Leathery and sun-weathered. Sixty-ish. Just a dark silhouette up there against the sun. Oblivious to me down below, four years old and soft, on a luckless four-leaf-clover-hunt… telling myself that maybe if I could actually find one, just once, then I’d get luck at finding them...

But wait…
a snake! A cute, little, slithering, green shoelace of a snake! Instantly I’ve got it clamped gently between my thumb and forefinger, right behind the head. It coils itself delightfully around my fist, spring-tight! This is better than any four-leaf clover! I just bagged me a new pet!

“
Grampie!” I cry, scampering oh-so-happily over to the base of the ladder… the cat presenting his master the mouse. “Lookit! Look what I just caught, Grampie!”

Grampie stiffens, his hat eclipsing the sun, splashing a kaleidoscope of prismatic beams every which way around me… his face gone suddenly dark like the center of some black-eyed susan (I can dimly make out the eyes) …not a sun-shiny face at all, but an angry, Old Testament
God-face… and the Right Hand of Grampie rising... and then pointing the Claw Hammer of Damnation directly down upon me… He speaketh.

“
Even the lowly DOG will VOMIT when it swallows the SERPENT!”It’s a point-blank, sawed-off volley that sends me back-pedaling on my heels and landing me on my bottom in the dandelions, allowing Mr. Snake to slip right through my fingers and go slithering off on a tear through the grass, zipping out of sight fast like someone who’s dealt with That Particular Voice before!

Talk about your ultimate Mood-Swing Moment!

“But I wasn’t gonna
eat’im, Grampie!”

~ ~ ~

I’ve never really known Grampie very well. He simply isn’t
knowable to some little kid like me, fundamentalist Bible soldier that he is, evangelizing that everything fun is a sin. Nope, and hanging around Grampie for any period of time always leaves me feeling kind of jumpy, always looking over my shoulder for any number of evils… but especially for Satan, of course… and we all know what it is that Satan wants.

…So! Amusing yourself with a little game of Solitaire, eh? Well, Satan’s in that deck of cards, Mister!

…Ah
hah! Sitting shoulder-to-shoulder under the tree and discussing favorite Saturday afternoon cartoon shows with your little male cousin Larry, huh? Well, you two boys best be puttin’ some distance between yourselves, thar! The Lord’s Plan don’t countenance them kind of shenanigans! That’s Satan’s doin’s!

Countenance…? Shenanigans…? What’s he talking about? “…them kind?”

No
, Grampie’s never going to be in contention to win the Warm-and-Fuzzy Grandfather Trophy.

                                                                           ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

OBEDIENCE SCHOOL  by Tom Lyford

A white clergy collar
symbolically separates
head from body… spiritual
thought from carnal desire

Raised as brainwashed
little pastors-to-be
back in our 1984-ish
Orwellian childhood 

the Faith-Frocked Fifties
with Big Mother and the
Thought Police manning
The Ministry of Truth… 

we were all noosed in
invisible ‘dog-chokers’…
psychological Iron-Curtain
‘neckties’… little phantom

Checkpoint-Charlie bottlenecks
restricting the passage of any
contraband ideas from
scaling the wall and fleeing

into the poppy fields of…
S
E
X              …down there… 

and a civil war of Nurture vs
Nature naturally ensuing and us
just naturally zapping our little
splitting-personalities blind

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NO WONDER I BECAME A POET / WRITER...

5/25/2010

0 Comments

 
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It was a roll of the dice really, pure serendipity, me stumbling upon the sheer, pyrotechnic power of random syllables. I was three, give or take a half-year.  Seated cross-legged on the kitchen floor in front of the stove. Stacking up some wooden blocks into a tower.

Mom was doing the supper dishes.

A few weeks earlier I had experienced this epiphany: SOME WORDS CAN 
RHYME! And to me somehow, well, that was just plain HUGE! Rhyming! It was Fun! And when I'd just conjure rhymes right out of thin air, it was Powerful Magic. It made people notice me, and happily laugh. And oh, I was a little 'performer' at that time... especially for Mom...

SO: there I was building my little castle turret... and there Mom was mounting saucers into the counter rack to dry...

"
Cat," I said. And then "hat." And then "bat." And then "rat." I looked up at Mom, beaming her encouragement back down upon me. She was so proud of her little Tommy. Oh, he was such a little smarty! "Fat!" chirped this probable future President of the United States here...

"
Dog," she suggested

 I thought about 'dog.' And then grinned. Okay... "Frog!" Hah! Easy! "Log!" Hey, I was born for this... "Fog!" Oh yeah, I was in my element. My future had  'Wordsmith' written all over it... "Nog!" (I was an egg nog addict, back then. Mom made killer homemade egg nogs.) "Hog!"

Okay,
my turn to suggest one... "Snake!" But oh, this one wasn't so easy... ooh... I was stuck here. But then, "Cake?" Mom grinned, and returned to her dish pan. "Bake!" And the game droned happily onward... me producing one-syllable nouns from my limited vocabulary and dredging up any and all possible 'sound-alikes.' Nothing but peace and harmony there in the Garden of Eden...

"Oh, I know: Duck!" Hmmm... Let's see now...? Duck... duck...How... 'bout...this...

"TOMMY!"

It's heart-stopping, isn't it, how fast the world around you can be yanked inside-out when you least expect it, like some wrinkled tee-shirt plucked from the clothes dryer... how fast somebody's mood- pendulum can be pin-balled across a room to ricochet off the walls? Suddenly I was no longer parked on my scrawny little butt upon the kitchen linoleum. No. Instead, quick as a wink, I found myself way up there in the middle of the air so to speak... and, speaking of pendulums, my Red Ball Jets were swaying left, and then right, at the ends of my little pant-legs hanging way down there below me all akimbo.

"
What...?"

I was the
reverse of Pinocchio: I had been the real live boy a second ago... now I was the puppet (suspended not on strings, but...) dangling from Mom's  painfully clutched fists my armpits. And Mom's pretty and beautiful face was now an Old Testament, fire-and-brimstone gargoyle...  It was not my mama's face...

"WHAT?" But despite the horror, I shakily tried maintaining my very shy  winning smile. A smile that was, okay, wilting fast right there on my skull, as the suspicion that I HAVE DONE SOMETHING AWFULLY BAD AND WRONG! began to gain a solid foothold... a smile that, if it could speak, would say, "What? Was it something I... said...?"

See, here's something I had no way of knowing back then. That in spite of the fact that we kids were all being raised as Methodists, Mom had actually been brought up in one of the more fundamentalist, 'holy-rolling' brands of churches. And whereas Methodists go to church for a single hour on a Sunday, in Mom's church your family'd pack a humongous picnic basket because you'd end up having to spend the whole freaking
Sunday there, singing and yelling out your Hallelujahs! and your  'Oh yes, Brothers and Sisters!'  And whereas Methodists might politely consider a sermon discussing the twin natures of Evil and Goodness, Mom's church brethren trained themselves as Satan-spotters! 

And right here and now, in a flashback to her old church days apparently, Mom's stare probed down into my big doe-brown eyes and glimpsed, I guess, the Prince of Darkness peering right back out of the sockets at her. Oh, she danced me in the air like a rag doll. 
"TOMMY! YOU... are going straight to..."

"What? To where, Ma?"

"To bed, MISTER! Oh my! Don't you ever...EVER...! Oh my! How...? How would you know...?"

"Know what, Ma?"

But there was no time to discuss this apparently, as I had just become the immediate recipient of one of those classic Satan, get thee behind me moments: me (Satan) whisked (behind thee) away... flown off to my bedroom as deliberately as Superman would fly an apprehended bank robber straight to the nearest federal penitentiary and drop him smack down in the middle of the exercise yard. I was a felon... somehow.

I got Solitary Confinement for awhile. I was left to contemplate what I had said, along with my apparently Evil ways in general. The only problem with that was, I had no idea what it was I'd said... couldn't for the life of me even remember what it was... All I'd done was utter a sound. A single syllable! And the world around me had fallen down around me like some toy tower made of wooden blocks.

Words, I thought.

Words are dangerous. Powerful.

A fella's gotta be careful around words... 



Explosives and Demolitions  by Tom Lyford

I classify the nouns in my arsenal
in ascending order: blasting caps
grenades, C-4, det cord
and anti-tank mines 

Verbs?
The matches,
cigarette lighters,
and detonators 

Conjunctions, pronouns,
adjectives and adverbs?
Just so much
fuse and firing wire

My poems aren’t about
the daffodil or cloud
My poems aren’t pretty--
they’re crude, they’re loud

I am the Guy Fawkes,
the Ted Kaczynski of poetry…
gingerly shish-kebabing
hair-trigger words 

into lethal combinations…
into weapons of mass description…
If I’m not meticulous
I’ll blow my damn fingers off!

So before you read one of mine aloud
you better yell
Fire in the hole!
three times


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    Tom Lyford

    ...who used to be an English teacher... and who used to be a puppet, a pauper, a pirate, a poet, a pawn, and a king...

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