Mrs. Smoot's Shimmering Poetry Hunt

Shimmering Poetry Hunt, Inc.
1 Iambic Avenue
Hope Springs, Kansas

Dear Shimmering Poetry Hunt, Inc.,

Please find enclosed my entry in your free international poetry competition. I love to write and I love my pet cat, Foofles, so I put the two together and wrote a poem about Foofles! Hope you like it!

Mrs. Rosemary Smoot, poet,
East Buggsa, Vermont

"My Sweet Foofles"
by Mrs. Rosemary Smoot, poet

Oh, how I love my Foofles,
she is so very pretty.
Also, she is very sweet, too.
In other words, she is a sweet and pretty kitty.

Oh how in sunlight doth she glisten
in her hues of black and also there's some orange.
In moonlight doth she listen --
Hark! I cometh with her dinner through the door hinge.

Thank you,
Mrs. Rosemary Smoot, poet


Dear Mrs. Rosemary Smoot, poet,

Congratulations! Your luminous poem, "My Sweet Foofles," has been selected as a First-Round Winner in our 2007 International Poetry Hunt! Our Editors were moved by the Mood and the Bold Imagery of your work, especially the Deep Love and Ardor conveyed by your Faithful Passage through the door hinge!

Your Poem, Mrs. Rosemary Smoot, poet, will now be entered automatically in our Second Round. The poems in that round will be the best the planet has to offer -- like yours! -- and so the Competition will be tough. Many poets like to give their creations the Best Possible Chance by having their Shimmering Creation rendered on High-Quality Vellum in Beautiful Calligraphy by a Gifted but Nearly Blind Monk on the Island of Corfu. To order, simply send a check for $29.95 in the enclosed ORDER envelope.

ALSO, as a First-Round Winner, your Lush and Verdant creation, "My Sweet Foofles," will automatically be PUBLISHED in our 2007 Shimmering Poetry Hunt Treasury. This gorgeous, leatherette-bound Volume will be available to all of our poets for $149.95 each (limit twelve per poet).

With luck, "My Sweet Foofles" could streak like a Dazzling Comet through the Azure Sky to become our Grand Prize Winner and receive a Grand Prize of $10,000! Don't delay! Send in your ACCEPTANCE form, your ORDER SHEETS and your checks or money order today! And once again, Mrs. Rosemary Smoot, poet, thank you deeply for making our world a more Shimmering Place by creating your magical creation!

Poetically yours,
Byron Wordsworth-Browning, editor


Dear Mr. Byron Wordsworth-Browning, editor,

Oh, how you have brightened my day! I went out to the post box by the hard road with my beloved Foofles by my side, of course, and inside the box there were the bills, of course, and the Reader's Digest and whatnot, and I almost missed it but there it was your letter on the elegant paper with the news that "My Sweet Foofles" is a first-round winner! Well, I raced back home and first thing I called my sisters, Jilly and Ruthie, to tell them the big news and weren't they thrilled (and jealous! -- yay!). They always say I have a way with words (and sometimes talk too much HA!) but they never DREAMED I'd be a winner in such a big contest! Well, take that, girls!

Please put me down for three of the 2007 Shimmering Poetry Hunt Treasury's (one for me and one each for my sisters -- just to REALLY make them jealous!). And yes, of course have my Shimmering Creation rendered on high quality velma by that monk in Corfu. Poor man. Along with my checks and all, I'll send along some carrots straight from our garden for him (I'm told their good for the eyes).

Thank you so, so much, Mr. Wordsworth-Browning! I'm so excited I think I'll go into town later and have a MALT!

Poetically Yours too,
Mrs. Rosemary Smoot, poet


Dear Mrs. Rosemary Smoot, poet,

Congratulations! Your poem, "My Sweet Foofles," has been selected as a Second Round winner in our 2007 Shimmering Poetry Hunt! You're now one step closer to International Acclaim and the Grand Prize Check of $10,000!

And here's some more Exciting News! Second-round winners are eligible to have their Poems carved into ancient Lava Rocks unearthed in West Greenland specially for Shimmering Poetry Hunt! These rocks are among the oldest ever found on Earth!

Talk about Etched in Stone! You don't get more Timeless than that! Just slip a check or money order for $629.95 into the ORDER envelope and let our Artisans get to work! Congratulations again, Mrs. Rosemary Smoot, poet, and on to the Third Round!

Yours through the Ages,
Byron Wordsworth-Browning, editor


Dear Mr. Wordsworth-Browning, editor,

"Bliss was it that dawn to be alive." Isn't that beautiful? I clipped it out of the Reader's Digest yesterday. It's by an Englishman named William Wordsworth, who might be a relative of yours, come to think of it. Small world! Small and blissful!

And what bliss you have given me, Mr. Wordsworth-Browning! First, the way that blind monk drew "My Sweet Foofles" onto that fancy velma was beautiful! I sure hope the carrots helped!

Second, Yes! please do have "My Sweet Foofles" carved into those lava rocks up in Greenland. My star and garters, what an honor! I'm sending in my check for $629.95 along with a couple pecks of garlic from our garden. I know what hard work it is, hauling heavy stones around, and my home-grown garlic is very good for backaches. I hope it makes your poor Artisans feel better!

Yours throughout Time Eternal,
Mrs. Rosemary Smoot, poet


Dear Mrs. Rosemary Smoot, poet,
Congratulations! Your Mystical Creation, "My Sweet Foofles," is now a SEMI-FINALIST in our 2007 Shimmering Poetry Hunt! You are now just two steps away from International Acclaim and the Grand Prize Check of $10,000!

But the competition is getting fierce! We have received Thousands and Thousands of brilliant poems from all around the Globe! Many of the Semi-Finalists feel it's important to wow the judges by having the World-Famous Blue Angels sky-write every precious word of their poems across the Heavens! What an exciting opportunity! Just imagine, Mrs. Rosemary Smoot, poet ... there! ... up in the sky! ... "My Sweet Foofles"!

Just kiss a check or money order for $4,389.95 and deposit it lovingly into the ORDER envelope today!

Yours on high,
Byron Wordsworth-Browning, editor
P.S. to Mrs. Rosemary Smoot, poet: Please do not send any more vegetation to our home office. Our attorneys warn that the garlic was borderline harassment.


Dear Mr. Wordsworth-Browning, editor,

How do I love this contest? Let me count the ways! Apologies to that lovely Elizabeth Barrett Browning! (Another relative of yours? My land, what poetic forbears art thine!)

I'm just thrilled to be a semi-finalist! I never imagined that "My Sweet Foofles" would take me thus far. As for the sky-writing by the famous Blue Angels, I had quite a discussion about it with Mr. Smoot (my husband). He feels strongly that the Blue Angels fly jets and jets don't sky-write. Also, he's concerned about the money, of course. But I said don't be an old fuddy duddy, this is my big chance and I'm going to take it, even if it means emptying the cookie jar. So here's my check for $4,389.95, lovingly kissed, along with a jar of my foot poultice. I know those nice jet pilots often get swollen feet and even nasty embolisms sometimes. The poultice is made of mistletoe, nettle, rue and fenugreek. (Left out the garlic, as you requested!)

Yours on high also,
Mrs. Rosemary Smoot, poet
P.S. Mr. Smoot insists that I ask where my Greenland lava rock is. Is it on root, he wants to know? Thanks! Sorry!


Dear Mrs. Rosemary Smoot, poet,

Congratulations! Your Transplendent Creation, "My Sweet Foofles," is now a FINALIST in our 2007 Shimmering Poetry Hunt! International Acclaim and the Grand Prize Check of $10,000 are now just a gossamer breath away!

At this point in the contest, FINALISTS like you, Mrs. Rosemary Smoot, poet, are being offered a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to have your Priceless Poems LAUNCHED INTO SPACE! That's right, through an exclusive arrangement with NASA, brave Astronauts of the Shuttle Atlantis will memorize YOUR WORDS and, once In Orbit, will speak them into the Cosmos! Just imagine a fine American, not unlike Tom Hanks, orating "Oh, how I love my Foofles / she is so very pretty" etc. TO THE STARS! It's a simply galactic offer -- that's what it is.

To get on board, simply write a check for $6,989.95, sprinkle it with prayers and launch it into the ORDER envelope. And let the countdown begin!

Yours in Deep Space,
Byron Wordsworth-Browning, editor
P.S. to Mrs. Rosemary Smoot, poet: The substance you sent with your last payment has been studied and found to be non-toxic, although highly odoriferous. As such, we will not instigate legal action at this time, although further postal assaults will be dealt with most harshly. You are hereby advised to consider this a SECOND NOTICE.


Dear Mr. Wordsworth-Browning, editor,
Oh, my gracious, I cannot believe I am actually a Finalist! I'm the talk of the town, that's for sure. Pastor Wilkins even mentioned me and "My Sweet Foofles" in his sermon on Sunday. I'm having a terrible struggle against the sin of pride, that's for sure!

The only sorrowful note is that I will not be able to send in the $6,989.95 to have a real astronaut speak my words into deep space. Mr. Smoot has finally put his foot down and will not budge. I'm so sorry because I think it is a lovely honor and I do so like that nice Tom Hanks.
Thank you, thank you, thank you, and wish me luck in the final round! I can hardly sleep!

Yours forever and ever,
Mrs. Rosemary Smoot, poet
P.S. Mr. Smoot is now quite peeved about the missing lava rocks. Could you please check? Thanks and sorry again!


Dear Mr. Wordsworth-Browning, editor,

I bet I know what happened. I bet the post office lost your letter. It happens sometimes. Just last month Marge Bibey's pension check didn't arrive so we brought her enough casseroles to sink a frigate!
Or maybe you forgot? People do sometimes.

Or maybe you're trying to spare me the pain of finding out that "My Sweet Foofles" didn't win. If that's the case, please don't worry yourself sick about it. Just going all the way through to being a Finalist was honor enough to last me a lifetime!

Whatever is the case, thank you again for all your lovely letters, Mr. Wordsworth-Browning. It has been a true delight corresponding with you.

Just in case it's forgetfulness, I'll enclose a tincture of motherwort from my herb garden. It's good for memory and for blood pressure too!

Shimmeringly yours,
Mrs. Rosemary Smoot, poet
P.S. Don't worry about the lava rocks either. Mr. Smoot drew "My Sweet Foofles" into a hunk of Vermont granite for me with a Magic Marker, and it's just fine.


J. Mudcat Miller

Climbing Mt. Brassiere

Craigslist:
Writers wanted for women's magazine.
Please submit 100 words or less on
"The Bra" for assessment purposes only.


Climbing Mt. Brassiere
by J. Mudcat Miller

Young men are all explorers who
must bravely make their blunders
through strange, uncharted regions
to discover natural wonders.

I well recall my first foray
one night in Puerto Rico,
when all at once the path was cleared
onto the Mounds of Tricot.

The challenge of the Snaps and Cups
still lay ahead of me,
but first I simply gazed in awe
from C to shining C.

At the patent office

I took my idea to the patent office today,
and waited with the others on the bench.
"Whatcha got there?" said the man next to me.
"Gadget?"

"More of a gizmo," I said. "Yours?"

"Same," he said, and we exchanged a smile.
We dabblers aren't babblers.

The wait was long and I slipped away
in a daydream. What if we were a pantheon of
Immortals bringing in our Creations? Over there,
the Titan with the eyebrows, he's got Time.
And the Gorgon by the window? She's got Gravity.

The Old Goat beside me had something strange,
made in His own beautiful image.
"What does it do?" I asked.
He smiled and shielded the box with his arms,
his wrists still wrapped in shreds of
leather restraints.

J. Mudcat Miller

"I" is reorganizing

Dear Creditors, Insurers, etc.:

Please be informed that all debts, premiums, etc.
formerly and hereafter associated with the entity known as
"I" will no longer be my responsibility.
"I" is now a wholly owned subsidiary of Me, Inc.

Me, Inc. hereby exercises its right to complete irresponsibility
for any unwise, foolhardy, ridiculous, selfish, sociopathic or otherwise
imprudent venture, scheme, gambit or twaddle. At present, Me, Inc.
does not acknowledge that it has or has not strip-mined or polluted anything,
but if it has, it will not share in the cost of any cleanup or remediation,
although federal bailouts and/or tax credits will be accepted.

Furthermore, to friends, acquaintances and relatives,
"I" will no longer be responsible for polite conversation
at cocktail parties, wedding receptions, christenings,
bar or bat mitzvahs, or any other assemblies.
Lawsuits for any disruptive, depraved or otherwise
repugnant behavior may be forwarded
to our offshore attorneys.

In the event of severe devastation,
Me, Inc. will of course be free to restructure,
possibly but not necessarily under the name
"Bite Me, Inc."

Sincerely but nonbindingly,

J. Mudcat Miller

On reading John Updike

(Published by N.Y. Times Jan. 6, 2008)

There aren't too many others like
our John, the writer, Up, yes, dike.
His mind, like his golf, is well above par,
and his work is, well, it's wunderbar.

But how I wish, to my chagrin,
that he could, just for once, begin
a sentence and, without a bend,
continue straight until the end.

When I read his books I find
it's like a Christmas of the mind,
and he is Santa, bringing pauses,
father of dependent clauses.

J. Mudcat Miller

Doggerel spawned by Margaret Seltzer's fictitious "gang memoir"

Fractious Fiction
(somehow overlooked by N.Y. Times March 2008)

Imagination cuts both ways,
it now is plain to see,
without it, well, that's how we got
reality TV.

But with it there come other woes,
whose impacts can't be hid,
like intern sex I never had
unless, of course, I did.

And no new taxes, read my lips,
and hanging-chad confusion,
and wars begun by searching for
those weapons of delusion.

But when it creeps into our books
we find it most unnerving.
We don't want Frey to tell us lies
or Hughes exhumed by Irving.

And now it's happened once again,
another pot of troubles:
a story of the streets is just
a splash of Seltzer bubbles.


J. Mudcat Miller

Strange items from the campaign

Of Bill Clinton, 'pump head' syndrome and Hillary's defeat

By J. Mudcat Miller

Many people dread a visit to the dentist, but I actually look forward to mine. That's because I have the most entertaining dentist in the world. His name is Al.

Over the years Al has made more than a few transformative remarks while my mouth was too filled with hardware to do anything but gurgle appreciatively in response. Once, for instance, he observed that my teeth were a microcosm of the American socio-political scene, by which I think he meant slow, steady decay.

But he outdid himself during my last visit. As I lay there gurgling, he went off on his usual tangents, mentioning gunshot impact effects and a few other choice oddities before arriving, inevitably, at Hillary. "Inevitably" because, well, she's perfect dentist-visit fodder, but also because it was Friday, the day before she was to announce her exit from the campaign trail.

From Hillary, of course, it was only a small step to Bill, and that's when the visit got gripping.

"You know why he's been behaving like this, don't you?" Dr. Al queried.

"Gurgle."

"He's got machine head."

"Urgle?"

He went on to describe a magazine article he'd read a few years ago about side-effects of the heart-lung machine, to which patients are often attached during coronary surgery.

"It does weird things to blood cells," he said. "They get banged around in there, slamming up the machine's walls. They get hammered into strange shapes, like boxes and corkscrews and stuff."

Then, according to Al, once off the machine, those misshapen blood cells can cause mayhem in the patient's body or, more observably, the patient's brain.

"Like a series of tiny strokes," Dr. Al said. "They call it machine head. That's what happened to Bill Clinton," he maintained categorically. "That's why he's been acting so crazy."

Wow.

Sometimes, in our day-to-day lives, we hear bizarre ideas and concepts. But when Al launches one I tend to think wow because he's usually right, or at least very close to it.

So I went home vowing to check into this earth-shaking deduction. If true, it explained so much. Why one of the brightest lights in American politics had been short-circuiting so badly during primary season, snapping at reporters, sliming Obama clumsily, torpedoing his wife's campaign.

Sure enough, he was right, except for one detail.

They call it "pump head."

Some Googling took me to a 1999 treatise about Billy Cohn, who took a soup ladle and customized it by cutting holes in it, and then used it during coronary surgery to hold the heart steady and keep blood from pumping through incisions, but allowing him to suture through the holes he'd drilled in the ladle. A simple, brilliant solution, but not one that was used during Bill Clinton's 2004 quadruple coronary-bypass surgery. And so, in Dr. Al's professional opinion, the former POTUS came out with pump head, which was causing his erratic behavior.

Dr. Al maintains that he put all this together himself and I believe him. He comes up with brilliant connections all the time.

But further Googling revealed that he wasn't the only one to connect the dots. Just a few days before, Vanity Fair had published a 9,647-word opus by Todd Purdum on Bill Clinton, snappily headlined "The Comeback Id," and subheaded, "Bubba trouble."

Deep into it, after exploring some other likely causes for Clinton's erratic behavior, Purdum talks about the potential effects of the bypass surgery, quoting a prominent Johns Hopkins cardiologist who said, "It's very similar to postpartum depression." Also, "a lot of people are never really the same again." And "their mood is not right."

Further checking revealed that others had already reached this conclusion.

"One of the savviest politicians of our generation, known for his wit, charm, and calm under extreme pressure, Bill Clinton appears out of character in the speeches and interviews televised since his bypass surgery September 6, 2004," wrote Dr. John McDougall of McDougall Wellness Center in Santa Rosa, Calif., a while back.

"[A]nd his mental deterioration may be accelerating," wrote the doctor. "Remember, this is the president who withstood public impeachment before the entire world for his relationship with Monica Lewinski without once losing control. Now, he is easily angered by hecklers, and makes factual mistakes and racial slurs while aggressively defending his wife's campaign for presidency. Everyone sees his mental and emotional decline, yet to date, no medical professionals have spoken out about the cause or offered help."

McDougall then does so, diagnosing Clinton from afar with "post bypass surgery cognitive dysfunction" and writing, "One of the best-kept secrets in medicine is the brain damage caused during bypass surgery." That damage is "so common that hospital personnel refer to it as 'pump head.' "

Unlike the "Bubba trouble" subhead deployed by Vanity Fair, McDougall's column was topped with "We Need to Understand and Show Some Compassion." The doctor goes on to do that, writing, "I am saddened to see our former president suffer from public humiliation, but I am disgraced that my profession has thus far failed to come forward with a long over-due explanation and an apology to the Clintons and our nation for the harm they have done and the secrets they have kept."

Further checking revealed that even Dr. McDougall wasn't first with this revelation. Back in September 2004, shortly after Clinton's surgery, freelance writer Judy Foreman wrote in the Boston Globe, "With luck and his relative youth and health going for him, Clinton, 58, hopefully will rebound in both heart and mind from the surgery." And yet, "many people who go through the procedure -- as 305,000 Americans did in 2001 ... -- find that, at least for a few days, often for weeks and sometimes for years afterward, their brains don't work as well as they did before."

A few hours later I watched Hillary make her concession speech, giving up a history-making run for the White House. And I couldn't help wondering if she realized that her husband's bypass surgery in 2004 might have played a key role in the demise of her campaign.

I doubt if even Dr. Al knows the answer to that.

Let's bring back doggerel!

Wardrobe Malfunction,
Tombstone, Ariz.,
Oct. 26, 1881

They say he drank
an awful lot
to get his courage
bolstered.

He wore his gunbelt
so damn high,
they say he died
upholstered.

J. Mudcat Miller

I tried to resist, but it turns out I'm too weak.

And so, I'm doing this, apparently. If you stray here accidentally, welcome.

Despite, the title, the purpose of this place is not necessarily to quibble with everything else out there, although that is clearly needed on a daily basis. Rather the purpose is to provide a home for witty, interesting, off-center writing. Commentary on virtually anything will be welcome. The only requirement is that the writing be as engaging as possible, and brilliantly so, if possible.

Thanks, and let the eloquence flow.

J. Mudcat Miller
Oct. 28, 2008