NOVEMBER 2021 ISSSUE of WestVirginiaVille.com
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1) EDITORS/NOTE: Allen Ginsberg & Bonfires | The Sky & Eternity | Manchin & Byrd
2) CHARACTERS, PART 1: A music video about how I never slept with Allen Ginsberg
3) CHARACTERS, PART 2: Allen Ginsberg speaks up in West Virginia
4) Q&A: “Where Sky Meets Eternity” documents an extraordinary artistic hand-off
5) POEM FROM DOCUMENTARY: “A Year of Few Apples” by Kirk Judd
6) POEM FROM DOCUMENTARY: “Almost” by Marc Harshman
7) DOGGEREL: “The Ballad of Bobby and Joe“
8) CARTOON: A funny thing happened to Joe Manchin on his way to Heaven …
9) CLIMATE CRISIS: Taking the measure of climate change in three short videos
10) MEMOIR: “Memory of a Waitress“
11) SPOKEN/WORD: “The Cold Visitor,” n Multimedia Poem by Bobby Lee Messer
1.
There was a man named Bobby
He was named after a Byrd.
Born up a tree-filled holler,
his life could have been absurd.
For he dallied with the Klan,
as a young man on the move.
Apologized for decades as
he found another groove.
He got himself elected
to the Senate’s marble halls.
And in his final decade,
Spoke truth with lots of balls.
When last he left this Earth
He was lauded like a king.
By three presidents and mighty folk,
For he’d become a thing.
He returned a bunch of billions
to a state that had been mobbed.
By barons and by oligarchs, who
plundered and who robbed.
Everywhere you go now, you
see things named for this Byrd.
He’s a West Virginia genus,
Bobby’s no longer absurd.
2.
Bobby’s crucial office
got filled up with this guy,
named Joe with family ties to
coal fumes that fills the sky.
Joe fancies he’s a bridge between
the Dems and the Repubs.
Though he only seems to really hear
what’s said in private clubs.
Joe turns out to be, right now,
the guy who stops all bills,
to bring more billions back to West Virginia
and its rolling hills.
And maybe there’s a Byrd somewhere
who’s spinning in its grave,
as Joe keeps sucker-punching bills
the world needs to be saved.
Now, across the planet
headlines all share the word,
this guy Joe in West Virginia
has really grown absurd.
The thousand things named Byrd
that dot the Mountain State,
are likely not the end result
for this guy Joe’s own fate.
~ By Douglas John Imbrogno | nov4.2021
RELATED
CARTOON: A funny thing happened to Joe Manchin on his way to Heaven: nov4.2021: Here’s what happened when West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin showed up at the Pearly Gates of Heaven, briefcase in hand …
