Trailers: The Words

The Words - September 7, 2012:  I saw the trailer for this movie awhile back and I CANNOT WAIT for it to come out!  The movie boasts a solid cast with Bradley Cooper, Jeremy Irons, and Dennis Quaid to name a few.  The story is about a struggling writer who finally achieves literary success with the publication of the next great American novel.  The only problem - he didn't write it.  Best part is it comes out right before my birthday!

On Tap: This Means Warsteiner

I'm back!  After a few days off from the blog due to work-related issues, I'm ready to once again regale you with tales of my beer exploits.  It's been a little while since my last On Tap segment, and in that time I've sampled several new brews, both good and bad.

Lets start with the bad.  The worst beer I've tried recently has got to be Sly Fox's Phoenix Pale Ale.  It is both copper in color and flavor.  I literally almost spit this back out after putting it in my mouth.  It was terrible.  To make matters worse, I went on Sly Fox's website and discovered that they hale from none other than my home town of Pottstown, PA.  What a disgrace.

Another flop recently was Rogue's Hazelnut Brown Nectar.  To quote Ralph Wiggum from The Simpsons, 'It tastes like burning.'  I didn't get any hints of hazelnut while drinking this beer, I do however, now have a pretty good idea of what drinking charcoal would be like.  This beer definitely will not make it into my fridge again.

Now for some of the better brews I've sampled recently.  I first tried Troeg's Troegenator Double Bock over Memorial Day weekend and have been meaning to include it in an On Tap segment ever since.  This is a fairly rich beer with a malty aroma and subtle spicy flavors.  You should be careful when drinking this beer, however.  With an ABV of 8.2%, this one builds up quick and can have you tellin' stories and actin' stupid in no time.

Finally, the best beer I've tried recently is Warsteiner's Premium Verum.  Fairly well carbonated and slightly tart, this beer is an excellent mix of just three simple ingredients: water, hops, and barley; I'm beginning to realize that the Germans know how to make good, simple beer.

Well, that's all for this week.  Next week is the Fourth of July, after which I hope to have a number of new beers to discuss.  Until then, happy drinking!

New Poem: An Empty Glass

For quite awhile now I have been meaning to write a rondeau, which is a traditional French poetic form.  Perhaps the most famous rondeau, and one of my personal favorites, is Paul Lawrence Dunbar's We Wear the Mask, which I included below.  Mine is nowhere near as good as that, but I thought it turned out pretty well.

We Wear the Mask

by Paul Lawrence Dunbar

We wear the mask that grins and lies,

It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes,—

This debt we pay to human guile;

With torn and bleeding hearts we smile,

And mouth with myriad subtleties.

Why should the world be over-wise,

In counting all our tears and sighs?

Nay, let them only see us, while

We wear the mask.

We smile, but, O great Christ, our cries

To thee from tortured souls arise.

We sing, but oh the clay is vile

Beneath our feet, and long the mile;

But let the world dream otherwise,

We wear the mask! 

An Empty Glass

An empty glass leaves rings just so

To mark a place that cannot grow,

There just beneath a window sill,

Repeating endlessly until

Grief encircles one loose shadow.

In books we too would often go

To places that we didn't know

And in so doing hoped to fill

An empty glass.

We read apart tonight although

A gust of youthful wind might blow

Back unturned pages and thus spill

Memories we never made, still

Circled on the calendar below

An empty glass.

New Poem: Listen

I wrote this over the course of the last few days.  It has been through several revisions and I'm still not sure how I feel about it.  Additional changes may be forthcoming, but for now, enjoy!

Listen

Beneath the whimper of the ocean there is nothing.

In a seashell gripped loosely in your hand,

No audible language is heard, no distant whispers

On the lips of waves, only the endless wind is sighing

Through the foaming surf that sinks between the sand. 

You offer me the pale shell, disinterested,

As though it were a telephone in which

There rings the dull horn of a smoke-veiled ship

That moves secretly through charted courses and

Whose call you’ve heard before but never understood.

In the muffled terms that often fall under my breath

As you pass, there is some sun-bleached speck of truth,

Some small grain hissing through the hourglass unseen,

A siren song that’s meant for you who hears the words,

But never stops to listen to what was sung.

So much moves past us unperceived in time,

Both spoken and unsaid; old messages drift

Toward the shore years later, quiet and insistent as

The oscillations of the lighthouse turret,

Never heard by wrecks before the glow is read.

Sketches

From time to time I have been known to get ideas for drawings, paintings, etc.  In the past, after getting one of these ideas I would find myself saying, "Man, if only I could draw."   The fact of the matter is I'm not a great artist and never will be, but that shouldn't stop me from trying to put my thoughts to paper in the form of pictures.  No one has to see them but me, and maybe some lucky blog readers (hint: that's you).  Anyway, I've decided to start sketching my ideas as they come.  It should serve as a nice additional creative outlet to supplement my writing.  Here is what I came up with today.  Again, I'm no Picasso.

Father's Day

On Saturday I went up to my dad's house.  I wanted to take him out for a Father's Day dinner and thought Saturday might be a little easier than actually doing it on Father's Day.  When I got there I noticed a photo album sitting on the kitchen table.  I opened it up and was surprised to find that some of my baby photos had survived our '97 house fire.  According to my dad, after the fire he was allowed to walk through the remnants to see if anything could be salvaged.  He grabbed several of the family photo albums and condensed what wasn't too badly burned into one photo album.  While it's not a ton of pictures, it's something.  I had a blast looking through it with my little sister and I thought I'd share some of them with my blog readers.  Apologies for the picture quality.

 I was a pretty cute kid if I do say so myself.

 Lovin' my dad's fro.

 It's fun to stay at the Y.M.C.A.

They were calling for showers in the living room.

New Poem: Noah's Ark

Recently I’ve been thinking a lot about my muse.  All artists have to have one, and for me, I think mine is my mother.  She has inspired a number of my poems and she was the first one to encourage my writing.  I have tons of great memories of her.   I remember she would often take us to Pizza Hut for lunch once kindergarten let out (which is probably why I love pizza so much).  One of the last memories I have of her is sitting across from her in a diner as she ate french fries.  I felt this great swell of pity for her.  I thought of her as a young girl eating French fries, dreaming of what her life would become.  And I sat there thinking of that young girl, knowing what awaited her, knowing this life was not the stuff of her dreams, knowing I could be that young girl too, sitting in a diner, waiting for my dreams to end.

Growing up, my mother was a fairly religious person, although her condition kept her from attending church on a regular basis.  I wrote this over the last few days and am fairly happy with it at the moment.  I may add to it, but for now, it is “complete”. 

Noah’s Ark

Divorced and in a diner,

The lupus looming just beneath her skin,

My mother sits stern-faced

Abandoning a diet.

In between the silence that is saying nothing

I remember a picture I did not keep.

My father showed it to me once

In a hallway of our house.

Slim and in her 20s, well built,

Some wildness beneath her smile

Is pacing back and forth

Within the confines of its cage.

Looking down I catch our reflections

Rippling on the surface of the tabletop,

A pair of empty vessels,

And as a great flood wells within my sockets,

Her hand leads French fries two-by-two

Into her toothless mouth.