Glub Dzmc: The Rest of the Story

In an earlier essay, I displayed my introduction to the appendix of the excellent anthology, Shaggy Dogs: A Collection of Not-So-Short Stories. Said appendix consists of a collection loosely termed, The Lost Notebooks of Glub Dzmc. In addition, the reader of this fine volume will find an appendix to the appendix, titled, The Lost Minstrel Ballads of Decius Brutus Dzmc, Glub's distant relative.

As is the case with Glub's poetry, you will have to acquire the above-noted book (from Trafford Publishing or the author) to see these ballads in their entirety. Nobody, I believe, was the one who said life was fair.

Feel free to take a moment to review the first part of Brother Dzmc's strange story, from the earlier essay, then, by all means, press on with the rest.

High on the list of the many things that the finders of Glub's notebooks puzzled over was the question of what possessed him to write the way he did. Most of his work is in the form of what we might, with the greatest of charity, call "free verse." Other works, though, actually show some semblance of discipline as to rhyme and meter. The facility for these things that he demonstrated in his sonnets, song lyrics and other such pieces can only be attributed to his more "savant" moments, if you get what I mean.

As for the free verse stuff, Glub made no secret of being an ardent fan of E.E. Cummings and quoted his poems at great length and with even greater fervor. Actually, he was quoting archy the cockroach all that time, but no one in his very limited circle of friends had the slightest ability to tell the difference. Never mind, in either case, it explains Glub's disdain for the upper case. The roots of his disdain for class, decorum, sanity, syntax, intellectual honesty, mouthwash and toilet paper are a little harder to trace. Please do not imagine for a moment that I am going to make the slightest effort to do so.

If the poems you see in this collection seem a little difficult to figure out, you should bear in mind that they have been painstakingly selected (meaning that having to read any of this stuff is inherently painful) from a seemingly endless array of pieces that hardly make any sense at all. Consider this among the works the editors declined to include here. And it's one of the better rejects:

i shrink the bubbles in
my pipe to
better see the grainy
waves of
amber in the garden of
earthly dirt. do
not stop to
snort the flowers on
your way to the old
bathroom floor. give
me all
my sevens. go
fish.

Questionable as the quality of his poetry may be, we must admit he covered a wide range of subjects, and more than a few predicates. In these pages, you will find poems about.....let's see....well, about....no, not really about that either. Nevertheless, in these pages, you will find poems. Let's just leave it at that.

*****

Some things come naturally to us and some things do not. And if a thing like...say...oh, I don't know, poetry perhaps, is going to come to someone naturally, it is probably due to the fortune of genetic immutation. At some point in Glub Dzmc's ancestry, then, there had to be a poet in the woodpile. Smitten by the same curiosity that makes an Argentine wonder what the weather is in Vladivostok, the editors of this anthology launched into an investigation of the Dzmc family tree. It was only after a quest of several hundred seconds, that they came upon the name of Glub's poetic great-great-great-great-great-great uncle, Decius Brutus Dzmc.

There are some who might say they detect strong similarities between Glub's verse and that of his ancestor. For example, the works of both poets contain a rather large number of sexual and scatological references, but nowhere will you find the four-letter words most commonly associated with those activities. Is it because, at heart, they were both men of decency and propriety? Of course not. Their omission of these words is almost certainly due to the fact that, in their native Czechoslovoon, such concepts are expressed, not as simple four-letter words, but, rather, as lurid and disgusting sound effects. Insofar as the spelling of those sounds was considered to be a near impossibility, most Czech authors and poets simply clog danced around them. Presumably, the same habit carried over to the hamfisted attempts by Glub and his far-removed uncle to write English.

Still, I have no reason to doubt that the two had some similarities in their styles. You know what they say: "Like great-great-great-great-great-great uncle, like great-great-great-great-great-grand nephew."

Here is what we know about Decius Brutus Dzmc. "B.D..," as his dyslexic neighbors called him, was a wandering minstrel, whose frequent and hurried wanderings were not without reason. At one point in his colorful, rakish life, he had so perturbed the Sheriff of Nottingham with his bad behavior and worse verse, that he managed to bump Robin Hood to #2 on "Ye Ten Moft Wanted" list. Whenever he found himself unable to persuade a nubile young lady to join him in a romp, (as was frequently the case) or even a desiccated old hag (just as frequently), he was known to take outrageous liberties with whatever erotic sculpture he could find. In fact, so often did he take those liberties with a nude statue of Venus in the Nottingham town square it became the first object ever to be named, "the statue of liberty."

The hallowed tradition of cutting off the Venus's arms actually began then and there, when the exasperated townspeople hacked the arms off their statue, so as to give Decius. less of a purchase when he went to do his thing. That appears to have stymied him for a day or two, until the sight of two dogs in the act of extending their lineage inspired him to take advantage of the very callipygic nature of the statue. It may have been because of the elder Dzmc's shenanigans that the first statutory rape laws were put on the books.

When he wasn't busy offending the villagers by having his way with marble, he composed ballads so that he could annoy the blind as well. We are fortunate, I suppose, that a number of his ballads have been preserved at the end this collection under the misbegotten assumption that the reader will not have had enough by then.

As for me, I have had enough already, and we have not even gotten going.-tcl

Sources

Shaggy Dogs: A Collection of Not-So-Short Stories by Thomas Cleveland Lane

Trafford.com