Billy the Mountain

~ qbit

“Billy was a mountain (Billy was a mountain), Ethel was a tree growing off of his shoulder”*

A responsive Reading to Billy Collins Introduction to Poetry

Billy, you’re such a wiener!
I think we used to pants guys like you
in Jr. High.
Fer Christsake –
 
Let’s take poems
and hold a BIC lighter to their words!
See if they burst into Hindenburg flame —
Zeppelins of hydrogen guitar riffs.
 
Take the poems you’ve been handed —
chip at them with hammerstone
and try to make a flint knife or spear,
something useful for survival when the world ends.
 
Or cut eyeholes in the pages
and use them as a mask
in a bank robbery —
then turn their meaning inside out
 
and disguise yourself
as a metaphor for the blinding sun
as you run down the alley,
cash spilling out of your bag.
 
Grease yourself with WD-40 poems, WD-50, WD-Infinity —
so you can slip through the wormhole
from today back to today
and only lose consciousness of a few hours.
 
Hell yes, tie them up!
Beat them with a rubber hose,
interrogate them for meaning,
make them give up the names, the names…
 
If they lie,
if they fail to tell you
the truth, hang them at dawn.
Hang them all.

*Billy the Mountain, Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention, 1971

For Desperate Poets

For Ruby Tuesday prompts

19 thoughts on “Billy the Mountain”

  3. I take the speaker to be the collective daemon of ferally true poetry, the one who holds us all up as unworthy, outre and stale, better as “zeppelins of hydrogen guitar riffs” and a waste of WD. Doesn’t hurt a poet to feel the cliff’s edge when trying to say it right. This “dude” makes me think of Oogie Boogie in “Nightmare Before Christmas,” an antimatter mutterer of the dead staring right through our stanzas. Well done, friend.

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  5. Ah yes! I’m in! Hand me the shillelagh! To me, Collins is like Brautigan but without the underlying sad truth. Playfulness with words and images but without sufficient weight. Collins is a card trick when what I really want from a poem is a dose of something that might land me in the ER. Biff! Pow! take that, mealy-mouth!

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  6. Have to agree with Shay…and you–Collins is celebrated for making poetry “accessible” but for me he never goes beyond a certain point, never asks the really tough work of himself…you do a better critique in your poem here–a mountain that is thick and heavy as rock and just as informing. Happy All Hallows, qbit.

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  8. Brilliant imagery throughout! I keep returning to cutting eye holes for a mask. And WD-Infinity (my god, with that and a roll of duct tape…)

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          1. Yes. If you want to do that you need to update your browser’s security settings to permit cross-site tracking. You need a token from one site to get data and permissions from another. I think maybe the Gravater.

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  9. Ha ha! This is brilliant, Qbit 😂 That hilarious opening, then how it unfolds. You definitely want to do that with some poems! Like, what are you talking about? Give it up!

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