2008 – Life is Great. (My last acrostic for Brown seniors)
Preface.
I love roads, traveling, feeling complete when
the right foot hits the gas pedal and I
speed forth somewhere between here and there.
On the road to find out, I sing out, like Cats Stevens, and ask,
how else do we learn who we are?
Everything is evolving at exactly the right time and
I know my evolution is
going as it must, because I am
human and I grow, everyday,
towards knowledge of what it is I’m meant to be. Yet,
all of us, currently, are trapped in modern reality:
living/loving/believing/dreaming/hoping that such
roads will continue forward and deliver us towards happiness and sorrow.
I travel in love with today, and I am
going to embrace my tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow,
head-first with a smile -- because
this is all I can do while inhaling my lifetime of lady fortune.
i.
Beyond the confinement of flesh
lives a soul that is
ubiquitous with everything;
nothing compares to the
karma of being dreadlocked in
Time. See,
I was born to this mortal trap, but
my mind belongs to the emancipation of my heart’s greatest gap.
ii.
Before I began climbing
on the educational ladder, my
grandmother taught me the love of words,
giant beings, brain turds, that can catapault
across pages of journals with enormous energy and a
nascent philosophy for loving life. I began to question my
Journey, as a young man,
on the shorelines of a small lake where I
heard her purple poetics. The memory is
near my soul dance and hypnotics of how I choose to survive.
iii.
Being alive means knowing how to laugh -- to join the
overture of shooting Janet on this blue-green planet of
love, forests, oceans, deserts, mountains and unknown
terrains of possibilities.
Even the sharpest mind, with its simplicities, has yet to be imagined
next to the orchestra of our hearts.
Brown has a way of swirling, for starts,
all the colors of a crayola box
in the artist’s tool kit, and the true
learner keeps their all-star beginning next to their crafted
erasers, pencils and markers of time. Cuz as the white power ranger,
You draw the magic with doodles, history and rhyme.
iv.
Bryan, my father used to say to me, You’ll be
useless unless you learn that if you want something done
right, you must work to get it done
all by yourself. “You’ll see,” he’d lecture, “that
going forth in the world means you’re man
enough not to complain, but to fix those problems that frustrate you.”
Sometimes I want to throw in the towel to let
everyone else win, but then I remember
my father’s advice
and that powerful word, integrity, and I
jump forward with celebrity clenched in my teeth seeking
justice and goodness for all.
v.
By the pond one night, a mosquito arrived from the
underbrush with dyed-hair and a lip
ring. She sang a
cacophony of buzz-buzz and
hizz hizz and oh, what a relief it is to hear
Such a sweet song. My nature was to whack it, but such violence was
unnecessary, so I didn’t smack it. Instead, I decided to look
zany in the eye of a mirror, knowing it was
all I
needed to realize how magical a creature
nestled to its nature
actually is. So, with a plop-plop fizz-fay, I asked,
how are your skeeter ways today?
vi.
Crazy little kid I was, collecting
ants in a plastic wristwatch, and
bringing them wherever I went. I
remember my mom yelling, parental rant,
exactly where was I taking those bugs?
really, Bryan, why can’t you have normal,
acceptable friends? Why must you play with ants?
Little did she know about the amoeba collection under my bed.
Ulcers would float in her head if I told her I took them in a plastic
container from my school and kept them well fed with an
imaginary kingdom of Lady Bug Queens and Planaria Princesses.
Everyone needs an imagination to survive. I kept mine in my room.
vii.
Crap, school sucks –
all this learning on someone else’s clock; with seconds and
hours are wasted in mandated institutional
asylums: Bring out the Scottish drums, historical Phylums and
let them make noise – ask the bag pipes to play, I say,
loud so boys in plaid skirts can punk it out in a nonconforming way.
Life’s philosophy is always better written
on a paper towel with black magic marker in an enraged
growl of Ginsberg-like howl of
Armageddon. School bites the proverbial weenie – but
now it’s over. Let the next prisoners arrive.
viii.
Caves are lessons on how to survive,
as they ask us to question all the
near-sighted lessons of shadows
on fire-lit stoned walls -- where our
necks, bodies and arms, mortal calls, are shackled.
He was right, that Plato dude,
enlightening young minds in an apathetic mood with
lessons of pre-
existential truth.
Now, I ask you from a telephone booth, “was this last stanza a lie?’
ix.
Crandall scandal, but I try. That’s the headline across the
entertainment section of tonight’s nightly news.
Ripley has the blues, those robin
egg hues, and he’s looking for
someone to sing them with him…
in a piano bar filled with cigarette smoke and worry.
Ellen Degeneres
rings him on the phone, but it’s blurry and beckons,
I want you to be my guest.
crazy woman, such a pest, he thinks, and
asks, “will you teach me to dance?” Not a chance.
x.
Clarence Dowell
once said, “the first half of our lives are ruined by parents;
now the second half is ruined by our children.”
Napolean dynamite says, “Sweet.”
A bay is God’s opinion the world should meet and go on, wrote Sandburg,
neither fire nor wind, birth nor death (ergh) can erase good deeds,
noticed Buddha
and now I wonder what you have to say?
xi.
Creativity comes from when the mind creates an
overture from experiences:
sunsets with friends,
laughing at what fools we can be when it ends,
or those moments
when life changes us and we evolve.
Creativity doesn’t solve such an
obnoxious curse. Carry a leopard-print
umbrella or wear a
red, feathered boa
to the prom to rehearse that a
normal life is overrated, and
everyone else seems ordinarily obtuse.
You, on the other hand, are an individual, notes this guy in Syracuse.
xii.
Doodle in notebooks
and collect news clipping of ugly wedding brides on
Valentine’s day.
I mean, keep track of the news that is
strange ~r~ than fiction.
Buy a journal, make one,
record the rhythm of thoughts
in undated history
tip-tapping ideas for
tomorrow, when reflection
allows you to look back.
Notice the world at this moment, letting
you grow wiser for the ones yet to come.
xiii.
Did I tell you the one about the
elephant and the eleven blind
men?
Each was a scientist and wished to
record what an elephant looks like.
Jokes aren’t empirical data, however.
one had the trunk, another a leg, the third a tail.
How can anything be known when
none of us have ever been able to see?
xiv.
Dillydallying is a way of life.
I can’t say I’ve
lived my own this way --
letting time creep up my legs
and tip toe towards the tendons in my arm. No. I
reach forth, grab kismet and
destinty before I let the fates get a hold of me.
Kicking back, though, my
ego grows frustrated…
not because I take moments to kick my legs up, but that I could be
dancing, or running, or moving
about the blue and green moments, instead,
loving every second as if it was my last, and
laughing at the insanity of it all – comprehend?
xv.
Early in my life I knew when the time
arrived to graduate, I’d
run, sprint, depart. I’d flee into the unknown like a
neophyte fledgling leaving its nest. I knew, too, my sister would
empty her branches off my parents tree a
year after I did.
Now, I’ve returned to the forest I once knew.
I’ve found my flight has gone full
circle and the winds still remind me that
keeping such memories in my heart is not enough. I need more.
xvi.
Each of us are madmen, emptying the
never-ending ocean with a fork. We
go bungy jumping on red strings of
licorice because we trampoline the
eternal risk of one life time.
Men. women. children. Each of us as
apprentices to the hard work of one
nerve-frenzied lifetime.
Learn from this chaos. Find
entertainment in the mundane –
a way to stay sane in the insanity,
never throwing your utensils
away, nor tossing a towel to the wind.
xvii.
Eeyore holds a bit of truth within his cyncism. but
Rabbit doesn’t sit still long enough to notice.
I tend to like Piglet, myself,
cause he’s innocently precious in a
kid-like way, chasing a balloon and looking for new ways to play.
so does Pooh, I guess, with a mission for a honey
overture of all life’s
nectar and wax.
Kangaroo teaches nurture
and Owl seems to know everything.
Tigger is simply a spazzagezoink and sees
every moment as the perfect place to pounce.
Life, notes Benjamin Hoff, is both the Tao and Te.
You have to find a way to ying and yang the reality every
now and again.
xviii.
Frog legs! My mom loves to order frog legs for dinner, &
I get sick to my stomach. I prefer sushi, cooked steak in
tempura sauce with a side order of ginger and rice-noodle soup.
ze idea of frogs, he sayz in a fwench accent, ze idea of
green legs and, WHAM, Kermit being fried,
elicits fury in a Miss Piggy rant and
rage. In this stage of my
appetite I’d rather not eat green accept for
lettuce, beans and wasabi
dipped in soy sauce.
Squid makes me nervous, too; it’s like
eating a rubber hose with suction cups
and crunchy toes.
No. Leave the Frogs and Squids alone.
xvix
God is hope.
I know this now as he/she/it has
brought me many
songs to sing for my little journey, especially
on days where I’ve felt out of fashion and alone.
Now, I need such hope. I find myself dangling at the end of my
Rope, and like some dope
on a see-saw with insecurities and doubt, this
boy is looking, more and more, way up and
yonder, so he can continue to ponder for
nirvana that never goes away. It is here I wish to stay.
xx.
Grabbed a basketball and went
outside to shoot some hoops today. It’s been
forever. Even though I played alone, I sure did
foul a lot – I even gave myself a technical for un-
necessary sportsmanship, which screwed
everything up for my team, because I needed myself for
rebounds and foul shots if I was going to win.
All I wanted was to stretch my
legs and to get some anxious
energy out of my system. Too quickly I was
x’d out of the game, though, and sent to some Russian farm team.
xxi.
Gigantic. The sea. The galaxy.
our ability to make sense of
the nonsense where all
the starfish wash onto shore.
Aren’t stars meant to hang in the sky at
night…to sparkle their burning possibilities before
days blur into illusions of the moon’s
revival? I suppose such questions don’t matter.
Eventually, the right time, everything
will be as it will and the answers will be in the palms of our hands.
xxii.
Gonna go to the library to grab something to
read -- anything has got to be better than the never
ending crap school labels as worthy. Gonna
enter another world where my eyes
race like letters on a keyboard towards imagination.
Books are the soul’s lifetime of work, and because they’re
entrenched in intellectual liquid, they
need the thirst of great minds to drink them.
xxiii.
Haven’t collected toenails in
a very long time.
You should keep a jar nearby, and
each time you clip those claws you can
stash them for your sister in a vessel of sibling love.
Sick? I have another.
Think about a booger bag –
a container for crusty
critters that can be caked for an
eternity in a package
you can mail Mindy on her birthday : ).
xxiv.
Having an artistic vision rarely
exists for a world full of blank pages. Yet, some of us move through
lined
thoughts with ideas. We need to draw
our original interpretation of a lifetime in personal
notebooks of our soul. The
Colors we use should transcend untouched territories and
overcome those visions of illusions -- the
language of shades that contrast diverse
lifetimes.
I look to the mind,
needing the invitation for the galleries that lie ahead.
xxv.
Harold didn’t love Maude as much as he needed to
erode the darkness he felt within. The
rope, the blades, the fire and the sorrow were an
old way of being told, “hey,
life is a
disaster in a Petri dish of doubt.” It isn’t until a field of a
Zillion daisies are introduced -- each
one an original and not needing to be like another – that an
eighty-year old moves on, teaching another to sing out with his banjo.
xxvi.
Here we go, across the stages,
onto performances of the unknown trying to
remember those who made us who we are. This is a
never-ending story of endless possibilities.
Brown is the color of soil, the swirl of an entire universe
rubbed together in hope.
It’s melted earth-wax on
the corner of first and muhammed.
Take this moment, graduates, to breathe in
and think about what once was and will
no longer be. When
you do that, you have permission to fly.
xxvii.
K, the consonant, the eleventh letter in the
alphabet, is supposed to bring us closer to a
language needed for communicating a
billion ideas at this very moment.
J, that which comes before K, does the same. But,
are any of these letters
meaningful in the philosophical
existential coindidental experimental
soup? Doopity doop. Poop. I haven’t a clue.
xxviii.
Kindness grows when
love is shown.
Anarchy blooms when
restrictions are blown.
Eternity looms where goodness and chaos
roams.
Little yellow hatchlings run across the farm
existing as little peckers, trying to do no harm – If
only I had some barbecue sauce for this McNugget wisdom.
xxix.
Kentucky was my home, where I
lived, slept and roamed while
evolving towards my
individual discoveries and
narcissistic insecurities.
Eventually, a
meandering New York state of
mind became a set of seagulls,
and like Frodo, I was called elsewhere, feeling unsettled.
xxx.
Little do the Brown bears know, when
entering the world from their dens, how un-
wise those honey bees are.
I’ve heard their buzz and pollinating business,
shouting, “here comes a bear…look out!” bizz buzz.
Call me a madman, but
I’ve been bestfriends with Alice, the Grizzly, for
eleven years. I know that beneath the
roar and growling of every “grrrrrr” ump, one can
always find a “fuzzy wuzzy” teddy bear, like you.
xxxi.
Lucy Liu once said she admired the
ogre-like strength of the Incredible Hulk and the
goddesss-diva status of Wonder Woman. Even so, she
doubted anyone would take her serious if,
on occasion, she raged hard, all bulky and green.
No, she makes a better woman warrior.
Now, Lucy Liu played Ling on Ally McBeal and
I was one in love with her (as much as I had a
crush on Portia DeRossi). Neither of them needed
kryptonite to keep me away, though. Because now I’m in love with Ellen.
xxxii.
Look at that last stanza,
u would think I meant to
knit those words for you, but I
entered them, instead, upon Logsdon’s script.
Naughty me. Always one chapter behind myself.
My God, has it
already been a year?
Really? Such truth
gushes at me with too much force. There’s no
escape, and despite all the improv of my heart,
everything I want to say, I can’t. So, elephant shoe. That’s good enough.
xxxiii.
Minds are like parachutes
and they only come alive when idiots
leap out of the plane and
laugh at the rapids rushing
or falling head. It’s important to
yell at the top of your lungs, “Oh, My God!”
Keeling over, squatting in air, you eventually land,
and plant your feet firmly on the ground again,
thinking, “Did I just do that? Did I just
ebb and flow across the azure sky
letting flight spiral me back to earth?”
Yes, our minds are the willingness to
navigate territories that scare us to death. Plunge forward.
xxxiv.
Mistakes are par for the
course and I’ve made more than my share,
growing, every day, more aware of how
opaque I’m actually becoming --
wanting the transparency for my humming
a carefree tune while tip toe-ing through the roses,
not allowing anyone to forget to smell the tulips.
Art is subjective, so the way I
sing the tunes in my head
has little to do with how others
laugh at my drumbeat. Every
error I’ve ever made has made me who I am.
You’ve got to be flawed, in order to be awed.
xxxv.
Martin Luther King
opted to stick with love because hatred
needed too much energy to bear.
The mountain still needs to be climbed, so why
go up it, pushing that boulder, with anger
on your shoulder when a smile should suffice? If a
man doesn’t know what he’s living for
each and every day, then the
rivers of struggle will pull him down, inevitably.
You need to keep the mission in sight. Your submission of
Delight comes from good deeds, violence bleeds
arrogantly between right and wrong. And yes, we must
Question to be strong, never
underestimating how our answers may take a long time to
nullify one’s curiosity. Stay awake in this
narcolepsy, sleepwalking through hypocrisy.
xxxvi.
Nature hides
green
over the winter.
This is cyclical, natural, hardly
unusual,
and in the spring, another awakening of
nirvana blooms. Gray turns into hope.
xxxvii.
New beginnings. We are
given life in a bundled sack that must be
unraveled and explored. Even if
yesterday all is understood,
eventually, tomorrow can hold the potential for
numinous doubt.
This is why I say be
ready to rant and shout,
always keeping a Vietnamese memory
near your thoughts and mind,
go forward to find that everything happens for a reason.
xxxviii.
On my neck, a
chain cascades -- a golden
oval dog-tag reminder that when I
need a home, I have one. Every
now and again, I grab this linked rope
entirely in my hand and
let go when I feel okay.
Kooky truth, that is, to say I
allow a necklace
such power for my soul. But
I am a weak man -- and
each of us need a talisman to believe in.
xxxix.
Oh, I can be quite stupid….I’m proud of being a
moron, an idiotic imbecile who
emits a dufus-
reign onto the kingdom of too much seriousness.
Cuz everyone needs a pogo stick
laying around in the garage
and each of us needs to bounce, while
yodeling, upon
the grand stage over the
orchestra pit. Audiences
need more fools….boing boing boing. bong. Am I wrong?
xxxx.
Peter Piper picked a peck of
ecky icky peppers,
catching cough contagiously from the
kooky lepers.
Izzy Bizzy Banana Girl
needed
Peter for a swirl, but
all she got was a hacking whirl
unexpectingly
giving her a twirl as Peter Piper gave a goober-
hurl of needing several doctors.
Jeepers creepers, Izzy yelled, so Peter could see her
uvula swell,
look what you’ve spit in my face.
I am now a disgrace,
and, of course, the fork ran away with the spoon.
xxxxi.
People need to laugh more than they do…to
reach deep into their gut for the
internally loud release of hysterics;
everyone deserves such humorous lyrics of
silly laughter….
they need to lose control where
eyes tear up and
roll in painful epiphany.
Keep the
ability to find humor from
your friends:
live, love
and laugh often. This is the way.
xxxxii.
Rainbows are visions
and only illusions, sings Kermit
underneath the shadow of cattails and
holly trees.
Believe in them –
each colored arc brings a possibility of
crayola box miracles on a roy g. biv
curve.
and, besides, rainbows have nothing to hide.
xxxxiii.
Ran seven more miles today.
Entered the outdoors of blue sky
and post-snow sun to
deliciously break a sweat while listening to my i-pod.
Laps like this, on wet pavement
against well-worn kicks, have become an emotional
umbrella for me. I know while
running my heart is pumping life, making me more
even-keeled and balanced. I
need such exercise, and to perspire my worries away.
xxxxiv.
River dance.
I tried this once, by the Ohio,
dangling my clunky shoes with Alice, and
let my untalented tip-tapping,
eccentric clogging
yank the seriousness out of my life.
Klydesdale horses are what we were. And I learned
I am not a man with
rhythm who
steps to the drumming
tunes with my feet.
Even so, each of us
needs to bust a move, so we did. We do. Can you?
xxxxv.
Rode around with a lot of crazy kids when
I was younger and
dappled with adventures that
lured danger every mile I traveled.
Each of us are daredevils when we’re
young -- Such risk is what ages us.
Krystallnacht. The Holocaust. Teenagers
running scared to death of national
identities that would rather not have them around.
Sometimes I think, God, I’ve been so lucky.
xxxxvi.
Rationality is a statistical nightmare
on a standard curve with little deviation.
Boy, we thinkers are cursed, caught by
illusions that are somehow mapped
near those truth and lies we tell ourselves.
Science is flawed because it’s human,
or we err because we’re not scientific enough. Do I
need a reference for this? I probably could quote Foucault.
Cause and effect. Placing the world’s
hubris under a microscope to
randomly run some tests.
I fail every time, but usually end up with a
short story that no one will ever read.
xxxxvii.
Remember to sing music from the gospel. We
owe it to ourselves to hear such song
when thinking about history, struggle and the
eternity of letting go.
Destiny is nothing unless we teach
ourselves to hear the church choir vocals and
notice the harmony of robed youth singing in praise.
I heard them raise the
spirit of culture once upon a time, and at their church I found
heaven – celestial bliss –
and I have been a changed man ever since.
xxxxviii.
Smith, Anna Nicole, wanted to be Marilyn Monroe,
crazy how some saw her as a
hoe, when really she was more like a
rake, learning to be fake for the
entertainment of the masses. The world
needs a tribute for this candle in the wind, this
girl with a reality show who made
everyone
realize how normal their boring lives really were.
Larry, poor poor Larry, our Kentucky boy, seeing
every joy disappear like a chocolate donut or
amphetamines in the throat of a star. I’d offer a
hardy har har, but life’s sad. so so sad. God is this stanza bad.
xxxxix.
Sanity is madness put to good use and
half the game is 90% mental.
Uneasy lies the head that wears the crown and
laughter is the shortest distance between two people, I’ve found.
Man invented stupidity
and I’m sure it’ll be reinvented again. Yet,
Nothing can erase our good deeds. (These are stolen,
Lines, quotes, once said
at a different occasion on another day.”
u, though, are stepping forward, on your own, and what is
read tomorrow depends on how you’ll offer
advice with your words. Trust me, I’ll be listening.
xxxxx.
Tomorrow, my friend, and tomorrow and tomorrow,
u will find yourself upon stage after stage,
to the last syllable of recorded
time, because, yes,
life is a shadow, and
each of us signify everything.
June will be here soon, and
eventually will
slip into more calendars of yesteryear. The
songs of high school are no more.
I was there once, the
class-cave of 1990 in upstate New York;
Ah, it seems like yesterday.
xxxxxi.
Velveeta Cheese is supposed to be
a tasty addition to pasta and hamburger.
Let me admit something, though.
Every time I leave the grocery store, I
never buy it. Why? Because
the mice I feed prefer Helluva Good Cheese
in thin slices served on Triscuits. They would
never
eat something like Velveeta.
Boy, this is a cheesy stanza, but it’s hard to find
ridiculous glitter to post upon my words with an
icky glue stick that resembles a Hallmark card. Things may fall
apart, Okonkwo, B.A.M.F., but who
needs such literature when you have your Babeez who dub you 4 eva.
post-face
My father’s advice rings in my ears at the strangest times.
You may one day find yourself replaying the
lines spoken to you,
again and again (that you choose to ignore), lines being
sung in your soul when
traveling your roads less traveled.
People are stubborn -
oh, we know what we’re doing and know when to put plugs in our
ears – but years will pass and
the words spoken at you, to you, for you, will enter
in you at the strangest times:
cause everything that needs to be said, is said to the wind.
Go out of this cave, 2008. Exit the
oval door and enter the light with knowledge.
Once, there were many who gave you a standing ovation, who
dedicated their lives so your life could be possible.
Bring the “idea of Brown” with
you wherever you go because
everywhere can use a little more of this place.
Follow your heart, soul and mind – they will always lead you
over rough patches of gray and
rainy skies.
So, this is a finale of sorts.
Every year I’ve written such silliness. It is my
nature to do this – some call it a curse, the
inevitable joke has always been on me, with each poetic verse.
Out! out! brief candles.
Remember the way this
school set you on fire – it’s your turn to set others ablaze.
Bryan R. Crandall
