Sure, we all know about how the Dark Lord Char’Nagh visits us at New Years Eve now, but imagine how weird that must have been the first time it happened. Here’s a poem about it.

Dark Lord Char’nagh came to mark the year’s end,
his inky, wriggling form eclipsed the sun.
No one knew what his coming did portend,
for this was his first time on Earth: year one.
The humans down below grow quite afraid
at this strange monster writhing o’er their town.
“We must destroy this thing” the wisemen said,
the soldiers made their plans to bring it down.
But none could throw their rocks or spears so high
to reach the giant thing they wanted dead.
They thought their failure meant that they would die,
but Char’Nagh only gave them fleas instead.
Dark Lord Char’Nagh is not something to fear,
just the terror that comes with a new year.

So anyway, 2011 is over. Wasn’t the worst year. Now we’re starting 2012, which is, of course, the end of the world. Lookin’ forward to that!

Actually I thought the whole 2012 end of the world thing was cooler back in, like, 2002. It’s kinda played out now. But I honestly don’t think I could start the year without referencing it here. So I did. That is all.

I met a dog on the way to work last night and I got to pet him a little bit. I was just walking by and it paid attention to me, so obviously I had to pet it. Naturally, I had to talk to its person a little bit as well, which of course was awkward, but still. Doggie.

Hakiu!

Call me a doctor.
As in, locate one for me.
I’m bleeding to death.

Here’s where I explain the haiku: He wanted someone to call a doctor for him, but instead that person just referred to him as a doctor, so he had to explain what he meant. This has been a Helpful PDR Poetry Note.

So, across the street from me there is a Vogue Optical, right? Place what sells glasses and your second pair is free and all that? You know. Anyhow, since as long as I can remember there has been an eye chart in the window. That changed a few weeks back. I was looking down one day and I watched in horror (maybe “watched with mild interest” would be more accurate) as the chart was taken down and in its place they put up some pictures of beautiful people wearing glasses.

I immediately chose to be outraged. This could not be a simple case of a store owner trying to change things up a little. What this was is an example of modern society placing less interest in actually using glasses to correct vision, but instead using them to look good. Once again society’s obsession with beauty outrages me.

And I was so outraged I forgot about it until weeks later when I needed something to put on my website. That’s how outraged I was.

I fed an apple to some horsies yesterday! Yaaaayyy!

Today, meanwhile, is way too hot. It’s getting to that part of the Summer I don’t like. The Summery part.

Heat, like a blanket, covers the city
and like a pillow smothers without pity.

Summer is like what you have on your bed, I’m saying basically.

Inevitably the curtain falls
and the actors leave the stage.
Less assured is that they all
will learn to act their age.

So, I just decided I should write a poem for my post today and that was what came out. Not very good, but perhaps it is a sign that deep down I consider anyone who works in the theatre to be childish and immature. A shocking look at my psyche. And since the poem suggests that I feel that way subconsciously, I might as well feel that way overtly now as well. With that in mind, I will now, being of sound mind (or at least as sound as usual) make this declaration: Hey actors! Yeah, all you stage-walkin’ make believers! You are all infantile! Why don’t you just grow up? Friggin’ babies.

Or maybe I just subconsciously noticed that “age” and “stage” rhyme and worked from there. Who can say? I am not a professional at this!

I will probably stick to haikus for a while. That said, I’m running out of old Contains2 prose stories to reintroduce to the new site, so I will likely start resurrecting old poetry before long. That’ll be something.

In other news, I just re-Googled myself and my site is still not in the first page of results for “Patrick D Ryall” even though pretty much a day has passed. Now admittedly I don’t know much about how Google works, but I would have hoped that a day would be more than enough time for them to correct their grievous Patrick D Ryall-related error.

Fact: I’m trying to break the record for most posts in one month, so expect several more essentially pointless things like this over the course of the week.

This last weekend I slept in three different rooms in my apartment. Now, I’m fully aware that this is not an interesting fact, but it does allow me to title this post without it being blatant lies.

Haiku!

Danger from the moon!
We can’t hope to defeat it,
but we can join it.

Hey, speaking of terrible PDR Poetry, like two months ago some song lyrics came to me in the shower and I saved that as a draft on this site for posterity. Well, now that we’re trying to update the site I want to get rid of all the unpublished drafts, so I’m going to go ahead and put this here. It’s even stranger than my usual poetic attempts, but that’s okay because I can blame the shower. I give you, Puppets On Fire:

Runnin’ out of ammo and food again. Every day the same old thing.
If brains were bullets you’d have a knife, but that’s good enough for this damn life.

In our places we ate and cursed. Trapped in this spot what could be worse?
So that dark column blew across the sky. We watched it and waved goodbye.