Generating a new song
you don’t have to be a Saint,
just imagine an old barn
in need of fresh paint.
Imagine a first kiss
or a first-time dancing in the dark,
a sunrise locally or magical
walk though the park.
Words, words, words,
stretch your vocabulary –
Drama, Mama, you need drama,
make this a Best-Seller,
forget every other old, cliched phrase,
the old decaying potatoes in the cellar.
Journey, make it an Odyssey –
“I wanna hold your hand,”
“Get Offa my Cloud,”
“Longfellow’s Serenade,”
study all the others,
soon you too will understand:
“Gloria, I think they’ve got your number.
I think they’ve got the Alias
that you’ve been living under.”
“Fukushima, how many tons
of leaking radiation
do we need in the PACIFIC OCEAN?”
It can be an environmental song,
find a cultural need and fill it!
Don’t let Donald Trump’s personal,
shallow stagnation befuddle you.
The Swamp is never a driving force
except to ESCAPE OR FINALLY DRAIN IT.
Overcoming Mediocrity
can be a driving force –
When you’re ready to sing your song,
call me, let’s do it!
©Peter Bray 12/27/2017
All rights reserved

Hum Betty (Good Fiction)

Hum Betty worked in a jewelry store called The Silver Mine in Small Waterfront Town, USA, and knew how to arc-weld, torch-solder, and curve and twist silver, gold, tinsel, wire, platinum, and copper into a thousand shapes and sizes…She got ahold of my heart one time and that’s why I talk and walk like a pretzel…No really, Hum Betty was a fox and a half – she had turquoise blue eyes or hazel or dark brown, the option is yours, this is Good Fiction so you get to choose your options, it’s sort of like the salad bar down at The Pizza Pirate in town, you can pick and choose to your heart’s content…
Much like Suzanne from Leonard Cohen’s song of the same name, she wore feathers (and more) from Salvation Army counters, and had a leather braid on her left wrist with small stones and beads from her Discard and/or Wholesale Box at The Silver Mine, and slept in a loft bed with downy pillows and an Afghan that Nana made above The Gull’s Place, an art, gift and sewing shop also on the waterfront…Why would anyone name their sewing shop The Gull’s Place? Well, gulls make nests of twigs and string, and well, this is not supposed to be a long story…
Good Fiction on the other hand is born from the facts and non-facts of life one acquires along the way, and then exaggerations, rainbow colors, and twisty roads full of potholes and gravel shoulders and dust are built in to give good fiction its character, texture, and non-homogenized flavor…Whether or not it’s pasteurized to kill its latent bad bugs, we’re not sure yet…sort of like Crohn’s Disease, MS, Lou Gehrig’s disease, and Parkinson’s, let alone Alzheimer’s, we’re withholding some of its mysteries for later…One has to be extremely brilliant to be a healer, a sand-dancer, to wear those feathers and know how to articulate a good species-saving cure for anything…take the Salk vaccine for instance… but, I’m digressing…
I first met Hum Betty on the bus going to grammar school a thousand years ago…she wasn’t Hum Betty then, she was just Betty Randana who naturally we called “Betty Randana’s Bananas”…all young kids are poets as they discover the misery they can inflict with their way-too-early budding love interests…Betty became Hum Betty later in high school when she was…uhhh…metamorphosing into The Foxy Queen of Homecoming…NOT that she WAS the Queen of Homecoming, but she could have been…easy and a half…she left us speechless…And all we could do was hum…so we called her Hum Betty…
After high school we went our separate ways, and did a thousand other things, until one day I was down on the waterfront and saw this redhead, or blond, or really good looking brunette (remember, Readers, it’s your salad bar of fiction, it’s your option, your choice!) while I was looking in the various shop windows, and there’s Betty! WOW! And it’s HUM Betty NOT Betty Randana’s Bananas!! AND she’s humming still!…OR I’m humming, somebody’s humming!…I could tell it was Betty because below those long tresses of golden (or black, blond, brunette, etc or shining red) hair, there were those trademark feathers and gorgeous gold earrings she always wore…big ones, small ones, pierced or dangly, they were her trademarks…and those feathers…WOW! What’s the deal with feathers? Part shaman? Sand Dancer? Some kind of Phoenix-rising Bird Woman? Who cares, she was wearing her Salvation Army feathers, with little ascending and descending beads depending upon your gravitational pull or inclination of the day…Hum BABY!
I had to go into her shop, she was softly torch-welding on something… “Excuse me, but aren’t you HUM Betty??” I said in nearly an inquisitive whisper…” She looked at me with one of those melt-your-heart smiles she was ever-famous for, and she didn’t look 3 days older than 22, maybe 22 and 1/2, but
she HAD TO BE Hum Betty!!  “Yes, I am,” she said, and you must be…?” “Pedro Gallop, we rode the bus together in grammar school…we used to call you…” “Yes, I remember what you used to call me, you guys were retarded…”“Yeah, but…How’d you get here to Small Waterfront Town, USA?”
“I had a friend here, came to visit, I liked it, so I stayed…” “How long have you been here?” I inquired…“About 6 years,”she said… “AWESOME!” I responded, as my humming heart began to fly around the room again in Small Waterfront Town, USA…(We could continue this, or “Hum Betty” could be our New Song Title…pb)

Peter Bray lives, writes, and works in Benicia
and has written this column since 2008.

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