(Ed note–Dame Daisy is well known for her little “beefs” with members of the realm. These poetic dust ups, even with her nemesis the Lambs, are usually over fairly quickly. They mostly stem from opinions about the Moving Hoof’s beloved adverbs; hence the missive of the day. Her use of small case letters is indeed sarcastic.–LA)
by dame daisy kloverleaf
i
the billigits are everywhere
flying phoney little squares
too wholesome too cute sez I this moving hoof
too Osmondy with their big grinning tooths
ii
dear billigits where have we errly erred
we were once as close as under and wear
but time its sad selfly self hath decreed
that you be pithy and I adverby
iii
oh what vilely vile little scorners
who skimp on fairness and so close borders
i seethly seeth over their obloquy
the finks have for we the adverbally
iv
your kind knows oh so little compassion
we see you as pains in the assassin
the hemingway song of your boozely wit
speaks only of dying by killing shit
(Second Ed note–To date the billies have yet to reply; but I’m sure one is coming–LA)
This week I examine the dipsomaniacal phantom known as the Tippleganger (aka, “Tips” for stumbling tongues). Until a dubious Feline named Rebecca Nurse “accidentally” toppled my gold gilt gavel on my pate from a luggage compartment in a train, which resulted in my infinite transformation, I’d never experienced ill health in my ninety-two years. I attribute that to my round the clock consumption of applejack (for medicinal purposes, mind you), two quarts a day from infancy on. I was born in 1810 (the last of twenty seven–the only to make adulthood), and the water in my home village of Hanged Crone contained so many amoebas that they were visible. My mother understood that applejack neither “moved” nor immediately killed you upon consumption. Therefore the Miracle of Me occurred, perhaps twenty-six instances later than it could have. (We did not know about microbiology, so, the elders–also jack imbibers–figured, naturally, that the moving slime was due to witchery and hanged the unpopular segment of the population.)
Versatur Circa Quid!
Tipplegangers specialize in entering the alcohol weakened minds of the flagrantly fatuous for the purpose of the creation of Big Ideas that lead to “interesting” actions, acts whose attractions vanish upon completion. Tipplegangers prize what they call a heeding. The more heedings a Tip can accumulate the higher in esteem he is amongst his own kind. And yes Virginia, that is sexist language!
Versatur Circa Quid!
Tipplegangers are usually pleased by their results, but really, where is the art equal to that of a phantom such as, say, a Quillemender? What degree of difficulty is accomplished when you convince a backwoods oaf, three days into “corn squeezins,” to strip naked and run inside a church on Sunday morn’ and shout “I’m here for the gang bang, Mister Jesus”? Nae, my underlings, that is poorman’s haunting and not up to the Quillish standard.
Versatur Circa Quid!
“The mayor has announced that Saturday will be the first annual peasant shoot!”
There, my subordinates is subtle Quillemending; only the deletion of an H was needed to cause all kinds of turmoil. In my learned opinion (aka, factual) there is little subtlety in convincing a beer soaked dolt that singing “Endless Love” at three A.M. in the yard of the girl who placed a restraining order* on him earlier in the day is an excellent idea. He actually believed that life was an 80’s movie. And although I keep up on modern times, I plainly understand that people are just as idiotic now as they were then. Regardless, thanks to the dullard’s low tolerance for fermentation, that grave was already dug, the Tip simply rolled the corpse into it and claimed a heeding.
(*Whilst I sat on the bench, the only “restraining orders” involved stocks, rope and chains.)
Versatur Circa Quid!
In summary, the next time you wake and immediately regret posting items such as wondering how Siamese Twins choose which one cleans their shared anus after defecation on your company’s workboard overnight, or similar gems likely to end your employment, rest assured you have heeded a Tippleganger. If a perfectly clean, soberly written, but poorly proofed missive is emended to read equally offensive, you have been blessed by the touch of the Quillemender. Perhaps the difference will not impress the HR department, but you will know.
(Image is of PDQ Peety, preparing for the fall the same way he meets every season–blasted)
Happy Labor Day to the USA (my first since retirement)
As always we in the Springs aim to fill every day of the month with poetry, stories, art and the weekly Sunday column by our beloved co-Editor The Drifter (and the odd imitations of such contributed by The Saragun Gazette). This week is full, but we have plenty of room to share things written by others who have contributed previously or who are new.
At first it was a week offered, but we can also do single days as well. And as autumn draws nearer with its omnipresent scent of pumpkin spice, as Christmas creeps into retail establishments the same way gold is edging maple leaves (but greeted by different degrees of patience and pleasure), the Springs is planning to become just as inescapable as death. So with that cheery thought in mind, welcome to September, one and all.
“Galileo looked into the night / and learned the truth was an old lie /
And he sighed, knowing his fate: / If I write that again Someone will
tell the Vatican” – Irene Leila Allison
“The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is
the source of all true art and science.” – Albert Einstein
(Wonderful images provided by The Drifter)
INTRO NOTE, or Here We Go Again:
From The Drifter: The idea for this essay came as a flash of inspiration like a lightbulb going on in a tired brain, while driving around (drifting) on the West Side of Chicago during a dreary, weary day after reading Leila Allison’s enlivening poem “Tell the Pope to Buy a Telescope,” available on Saragun Springs; first date of publication Tuesday, August 26, 2025.
I.e. it was a weary, dreary day until reading the poem then being inspired by the poem to write this essay about it.
The Drifter suddenly pulled over near a vacant lot on the West Side, nodded to the old fellows smoking their bud around a trash can watering hole under a tree, then committed most of this essay to paper via a short-hand note-taking method in a language invented by none other than himself, readable by only himself, with colored pens on repurposed paper like old bills and advertising circulars.
It was like Leonardo da Vinci furiously working at his desks (he had more than one) in the middle of the night, long hair crazy-wild and fingernails long, dirty, and broken like Bob Dylan’s from digging up corpses for dissection and anatomical drawings the night before.
All that remained to do was draw it all together and translate it, somehow, into fairly readable standard English prose.
The results can be perused below; now or later or much later.
One of the first questions to ask when reading a poem (or anything) is, “What did the writer need to know in order to write this?”
Harold Bloom said that the main purpose for reading fine (and great, which is a cut above fine) imaginative literature was and is in order to augment one’s own consciousness.
Another word for “consciousness” here is PERSONALITY.
Another word/s for “augment” here is make it better.
And the answer to the question, “What did the writer need to know in order to write this?” these days is, all too often, “Nothing;” or, “Not much.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson, author of “The Shot Heard ’Round the World,” and whom Bloom called the Mind of America because of Waldo’s influence, both positive and negative, on all other subsequent American thinkers, whether they know it or not, said that a poem was “a meter-making argument.”
What Emerson meant by this (or one thing anyway) is that the “argument,” or reason-for-being, of a poem is what elevates its language, what calls for the poem to be written as a poem instead of in prose.
The “argument” here is NOT polemical, political, a run-of-the-mill opinion, or a straight-up “idea” like how to conquer the moon or invent a better way of doing something practical.
Poetry’s impracticability is another one of its essential features. If it was only about doing things it wouldn’t be poetry, or not poetry (which is thinking) at its highest levels.
Philip Larkin called the modern short poem, which is the most common form of poem now, “a single emotional spear-point.”
An emotional spear-point has to have a deep reason for being, or it can’t be itself.
PART TWO
Here are just a few of the things Irene Leila Allison needed to know in order to write her poem “Tell the Pope to Buy a Telescope,” according to this writer (The Drifter, aka Dale Williams Barrigar, MFA, PhD).
One: What it was like to be none other than Galileo.
Two: What the power dynamics were like in society during Galileo’s time. (He was born the same year as Shakespeare and lived 26 years longer than The Bard, to the age of 77, which would be more akin to 97 today.)
Three: What it is like to challenge authority with the pen (or the keyboard) in any age. (For this to happen, you need to challenge it with your mind and your life first.)
Four: What the power dynamics are like in society in any age.
Five: The subversive nature of true creativity (or creativity at its deepest levels) in any age, including Galileo’s, and our own.
Six: The price to be paid for being subversive in any age, whether it be in writing or in any mode, like any form of resistance, which is available and morally required (in different forms, depending on the person) of everybody. (Jesus himself was nothing if not a rebellious spirit, at least when it came to the goings-on in this earthly realm.)
This list could go on but the Drifter will stop with a round half dozen in order to give the reader time to think about this.
…
…
The seventh thing (7 = heaven) Leila Allison needed to know in order to write this poem was how to fit all of the above into the space of just over one hundred words.
Return to the half dozen items listed above, and then ponder knowing all that, and then ponder the magic of powerfully, clearly, and beautifully expressing all of the above in a third of the words Lincoln used for his Gettysburg Address.
Not a single syllable is wasted in Ms. Allison’s poem, much less a single word.
Words are reinvented in this poem, used so they can be understood by the reader but also torn out of their “normal” context and made new again.
Here is just one example.
Describing Galileo making his amazing discoveries that changed the entire human world while under house arrest, Ms. Allison says, “the spheres (and spears) remained.”
In five words, she’s boiled down one of the most profound humans and human projects of all time into a space that is tiny in terms of its actual size, and as gigantic as the entire universe itself in terms of its implications.
This is what true poetry is, saying so much in five words or less that entire pages, or even books, of prose could be written upon it and still not capture its essence.
And doing it all while being beautiful.
At this point, I urge any and all readers of this to seek out Ms. Allison’s poem “Tell the Pope to Buy a Telescope.”
The title sounds like it could have been come up with by James Thurber, Lewis Carroll, or Dr. Seuss (he was one of the most important American poets of all time, which is neither a joke nor an exaggeration), a sign of the light hands of the poet.
Because children, too, should be told about people like Galileo; and the intelligent child in all of us is what keeps us alive.
And after truly studying, and absorbing, this poem, you will know more about Galileo, the world, and the universe than, literally, entire book-length works about him or his times can tell you.
(My Imaginary Friend and second in command of the realm, Renfield, has the unique ability to wake after a bout of binge drinking without the slightest trace of a hangover. There are only two ways to avoid the hangover, stay loaded around the clock or be lucky enough to have the constitution of an Imaginary Friend. Now, alcohol still affects her in the usual short term way, which makes her as good a candidate to provide a review every Friday–Leila)
Booze Reevooze by Renfield
Hullo parched readers! Today I examine a classic no longer available on Earth but is (thank Zod) plentiful in Saragun Springs, by name, the legendary Bacardi 151.
Sadly the modern “grown-ups” cannot handle 75.5 proof inflammable rum. The modern day wussieness confounds and embarrasses awesome persons such as myself. Then again anyone who rides a child’s scooter to work while huffing on something that produces an odor similar to blackberry jam probably shouldn’t be messing with the hard stuff.
I like my 151 with Coke. As always I will voice dictate my experience as I work my way down the bottle. Now, as I pour my first drink, I can just smell flames of inebriation wanting to burst.
Mmmmmmm…talk about smooth–hoo wee. Oh yes, there’s nothing like beginning a day with a bottle on an empty stomach. Allow me to refill my glass and catch a toasty mental wave.
Sorry gang but I snuckered one without recording it. Such awesomenicity.
Three in row brings the visions! Ho Zod! You know, I was at the bar the other day, right? Just sittin there and this Horse comes up and sez “Hey baby.” I told him fuck off, but all lady like. But no, turns out he had a lisp and said “hay bale, pleeze” to the beerkeep. I went with the sorries and sprung for an alfalfalafa shooter.
Five alive, not even half an hour! New record…What was I sying–um, saying? Oh yeah on a scale of one-ten I give Ronnie B. here a, what else, 151! Zoddamnit!!!
I tell ya bout the Horse? I think I did. Big ol sum bitch. Anyway, I don’t feel like talking right now….got sum serious drink on…
Come back nest wick and learn about Missississississippi corn squeezins….
Renfield
(Second Ed. Note–This is the longest Booze Reevooze to date. The writer usually cracks the seal of the bottle, says hello and forgets about the column in about a hundred words. So she goes-LA)
(Ed. Note–Today, from the Saragun Gazette, I present the most popular feature, Dear Daisy. Daisy Kloverleaf is somewhat no nonsense with her beseechers. In fact, from observation, I must conclude that every one of her missives ends with the same advice. Still, again from observation, I conclude it to be sound advice–LA)
Q: Dear Daisy,
I am sad because I am a lovelorn and lonesome lost soul. My friends tell me that there is someone for everyone, and being that I possess a wonderful personality, it might take a little more time for God to send me that perfect love match. People also tell me to turn that frown upside down, be a citizen of SaraCAN Springs and not to accept wood coins in matters of commerce.
Do you, wise Daisy, have further advice? It seems that God is taking a very long time to answer my prayer.
Yours truly, Desperate Doolie.
A: Dear Desperate
It sounds like you are bankingly banking on your “wonderful personality” to bringly bring true love. And I will wager that where looks are concerned your best feature is your “wonderful personality.” Money can erase a lot of problems here, but rich people do not send letters that arrive with postage due, so I guess we can rule that out. The good news is you will not have to sift through the shallow element but there won’t be much “Plan B” either.
Regardless, since you let the cliches of others direct your life to the pointly point you must ask a ten pound herbivore for advice, I think it is for the best that you should fail to reproduce. Consider it as givingly giving back.
Dame Daisy
(Ed. Note–I forgot to mention that Daisy is an adverb junkie. But I guess you have probably figuredly figured it out by now–LA)
Saragun Springs 