How many poets?

with apologies…

How many poets does it take
to cook a dinner?

One to conceptualize it,
Three to interpret it (in
three different ways),
Five to be too busy composing, and
One food-poet to cook the meal.

How many poets does it take
to screw in a lightbulb?

Two to perform scansion of each 
turn of the bulb (and argue about it),
One to comment on bringing light
to the darkness,
One to rail against Man's innate
desire to alter reality,
Five to demonstrate ignorance of
basic threaded objects, and
One mechanical-poet to screw it in.

How many cooks and janitors does it take
to describe grief as relayed 
in the robin's song at dawn which
promises another empty day? How
many paint their pain with words,
plain for all persons to see?
How many read to the last line
of a silly poem about cooking
dinners and changing lightbulbs?

16/100

Today I discovered I had numbered two poems #9. Yay! This so-called 15th poem is the 16th!

I had thought the poems I dragged out of notebooks and polished would garner more comments and better ‘reviews’ than those dashed out on the fly, but this isn’t the case. For the record, poems 1 and 2 were openly declared as poems written in June while traveling in Scotland, Wales, and England. I just hadn’t got around to posting before I started this 100-day challenge. Poem #3, “Business Poetry 101,” was written approximately 2004 or 2005, edited moderately and posted. Poem #7, “Between the Boards,” also received moderate editing; the biggest change occurred when I moved the final lines down one to signify they occurred at the same spacing as the boldfaced ones above them, and eventually they became boldfaced as they composed a new set of boundaries. The haiku written as #9 but in reality was #10 sprang from an opening line to a haiku which I then re-wrote for lines two and three. The most recent recycle job was #11,”Dova,” which had a final, three-line stanza added to it. I’m pretty sure I’ve run out of poems worthy of being recycled, 16% of the way into this challenge, the training wheels come off, the water wings disappear, and I need to keep the plates spinning by myself now. After that my next biggest challenge will be in two weeks when I need to write a poem each day while on a two-week vacation. (I might just stockpile them.)

Muffin Man

My first eight English muffins. February 2026.

On Tuesday the 10th, as I succumbed to a weird sickness which has visited me every week since January 14th—recurring every Tuesday or Wednesday—I made English muffins for the first time. They turned out…”okay”. They are much more dense than a store-bought, and I long for the large amount of pockets and crevices which make up my definition of an English muffin. But…they did the trick the next day when Canadian bacon, a fine poached egg, and some Hollandaise sauce graced them!

Association in black

Paint It, Black
“I’ll have a black-and-tan”
I’m way too close to that Doberman….
Your Tax Dollars At Work (and a 15-minute delay on the highway)
“And this was the artist’s Black Period, noted more for its playful use of browns and other earth tones than for the use of black which of course prevailed throughout his career.”
Lava still looks hot–don’t touch!
I think I saw Spock do a mind-meld with that thing.
Huh! Next time I won’t pre-heat the cast iron on the BBQ before I put in the cornbread batter.

Sawmill gravy

At the risk of offending multiple food groups (in the sense of those of us who eat food), let me offer up one of the more satisfying meals I’ve made in the past year. About six weeks ago I purchased Welcome To The Buttermilk Kitchen a cookbook by Suzanne Vizethann who operates a restaurant in the Atlanta area called Buttermilk Kitchen. The above photo is of a Southern staple: sawmill gravy over biscuits, i.e., “biscuits and gravy.” The gravy can be of several varieties, but the most common is a béchamel-type base with sausage in it.

It works like this: take five frozen sticks of European butter (the kind with a higher fat content than American butter); grate it coarsely. Whisk flour, sugar, baking powder, salt and then fold in the grated butter “until mixture resembles sand.” My patience level has never achieved this standard. Add 2.75 cups (1.33 pints) of “high quality, full-fat” buttermilk. Drop them on baking sheet with a 4-inch ice cream scoop and bake.

I use Michael Ruhlman’ From Scratch to make my own breakfast sausage. (If you’re into cooking, I heartily recommend this book. It takes 10 basic meals and riffs off of them with dozens of recipes for each one. For example, the sausage recipe–ridiculously simple–is in Chapter 2 which is “The Omelet”.) The Sawmill Gravy recipe starts off like a basic béchamel, veers this way: 5 cups of chicken stock and 2 cups of heavy cream. The “4 dashes of Tabasco” is perhaps not in your béchamel either. The rest is obvious. Split a biscuit. Ladle gravy over it. Sprinkle with parsley if you’ve got it. Eat. Retire to porch/living room/deck. Loosen pants. Snooze.

Repeat as necessary.