{"id":318166,"date":"2020-02-27T06:00:08","date_gmt":"2020-02-26T20:00:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/?p=318166"},"modified":"2020-02-27T06:00:08","modified_gmt":"2020-02-26T20:00:08","slug":"t-o-a-s-t-telling-old-age-sonnet-tales-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/t-o-a-s-t-telling-old-age-sonnet-tales-2\/","title":{"rendered":"T.O.A.S.T.: Telling Old Age Sonnet Tales"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><em>Inspiration for this poem comes from Elizabeth Bishop, U.S. Poet Laureate 1949:\u00a0\u201cthe armored cars of dreams contrived to let us do many dangerous things\u201d and a painting by 15th\u00a0century painter Hieronymus Bosch, Tondal\u2019s Last Vision.<\/em><br \/>\n\u00a0<br \/>\n<strong>In the Armored Cars of Dreams<\/strong><br \/>\nProtection, perfection, putridity, and perfidy inside your head<br \/>\nmyriad mesmerizing selections while staying home in bed<br \/>\nfalling in and out of love, dreadful and \u00a0delightful daydreams<br \/>\nfalling sound asleep, before waking state, in sleep very deep<br \/>\ndeep inside Elizabeth Bishop\u201ds armored cars of dreams<br \/>\nreside volumes of laughter and night fright screams<br \/>\nREM speed developing, enveloping detriments and improvements<br \/>\ntime and temperature differential doesn\u2019t seem to matter<br \/>\nTondal\u2019s Last Vision scatters, splatters, pitter pitter patter<br \/>\nwalking on a wire, a wheel of death revolves slowly on fire<br \/>\na bed of glass, a bed of nails, a barge of death as dreamtime sails<br \/>\neast of Tinian dropping into the depths of the Marianas Trench<br \/>\nfumaroles, lava flows, a whale blows, submerged sulfuric stench<br \/>\nhigh seas, high speeds, polar bears plead, addicts need, ice feeds<br \/>\ntyphoons terrorize the night, sea birds in flight circling to the right\u00a0<br \/>\njaywalking, running across melting polar ice, shooting loaded dice<br \/>\nand so inside the armored cars of dreams I sleep and so do you<br \/>\nso real, surreal, beyond reality, false memories, and some true.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n<p><strong>Jose &#8216;Pepe Batbon&#8217; Connolly (Special to the Saipan Tribune)<\/strong><br \/>\nJoey \u201cPepe Batbon\u201d Connolly is a retired teacher and has been named a poet laureate of Tinian. He has taught English in CNMI public schools for the past 30 years. He has also taught in Alaska, New Orleans, and Las Vegas.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Inspiration for this poem comes from Elizabeth Bishop, U.S. Poet Laureate 1949:\u00a0\u201cthe armored cars of&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":11,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[21805],"class_list":["post-318166","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-opinion","tag-poet-laureate"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/318166","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/11"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=318166"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/318166\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=318166"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=318166"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=318166"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}