Janis Butler Holm, performed by Bett Butler and Joël Dilley

Sound Poems: from Rabelaisian Play Station

Listen to Bett Butler and Joël Dilley perform Janis Butler Holm’s piece:

I

Weather is the knuckleball an error longs to sanctify. Do fifty rising prices make a pile of
disbelief? Your cockamamie parasites have detonated mistletoe. To quarantine a bobolink,
whicker, snicker, bray. So here’s the sportive story line, insular and ravenous. Pardon my
reliance on their velvety surprise. Anticipation is the grapefruit of our jingle-jangle pulpitry.
Levitate the capitals. Hobnob with chiffon.

II

He thinks he needs a marmoraceous nucleoid.
He thinks he needs a schizodinic puttyroot.
He thinks he needs a lovey-dovey blatherskite.
He thinks he needs a retrocessive centrosphere.
He thinks he needs a dimerizing laccolith.
He thinks he needs a hardy-dardy jiggumbob.
He thinks he needs a blastoporal doublethink.
He thinks he needs a fumble-fisted candyfloss.
He thinks he needs a postpubescent usufruct.
He thinks he needs a germinative microtome.

III

Underneath the teeter-totter lurks a thieving pompadour. Cook the books with mercury;
syncopate ballet. Where are all her isotopes, her swizzle sticks, her argonauts? If they zap the
blister packs, malamutes will grieve. And why the gilded pepperbush, haggard and irascible?
Given silken synthesizers, what can we forego? Technicolor donuts mark his status as a
minuteman. Hence the stinky ingénues, their hypertextual rye.

IV

She finds, perforce, a neutropenic gadabout.
She finds, perforce, a paramastoid strobotron.
She finds, perforce, a creepy-crawly buccula.
She finds, perforce, a leptospiral derring-do.
She finds, perforce, a ramentaceous frippery.
She finds, perforce, a helter-skelter polliwog.
She finds, perforce, a flabbergasted esterase.
She finds, perforce, a vexillary nincompoop.
She finds, perforce, a suffrutescent opsimath.
She finds, perforce, a diamantine hubbleshow.

V

Neolithic pity logic buttresses this parking lot. Who degreased their fritterware and sucker-
punched his comb? Cash-and-carry rhapsodists empower our stenography. When she
hacked the muzzleloaders, functionaries barked. Consequently, planets squabble–tawny,
dank, and jubilant. After sugar lilies vanish, how shall we get by? O bloody-minded emu, I
adore your polynomials. But check the oily drama stain, the sleeker meat of whey.

Janis Butler Holm lives in Athens, Ohio, where she has served as Associate Editor for Wide Angle, the film journal. Her prose, poems, and performance pieces have appeared in small-press, national, and international magazines. Her plays have been produced in the U.S., Canada, and England. Bett Butler (www.bettbutler.com) authored two albums of original music, Short Stories and Myths & Fables. A winner in the jazz category of the International Songwriting Competition, her latest album, American Sampler, placed in the top 10 on the iTunes Great American Songbook chart its first week in release. Bassist/composer Joël Dilley (www.joeldilley.com) produces music licensed for HBO, Discovery Channel, Food Network, and more. A nominee in the Independent Music Awards and recipient of a grant from the Artist Foundation, he is currently finishing his fourth album, Lullaby of the Flatlands, slated for release in 2013.