NaPoWriMo, Day 1

First off, I would like to thank Maureen for featuring this blog on today's NaPoWriMo posting! I am greatly honored! Thank you, Maureen!

Well, we are at the first official day, and the prompt is to write a poem about a secret shame or a secret pleasure. Maureen mentioned bad movies among the secret pleasure. They are been a secret (okay, not so secret, to be honest) pleasure of mine for years, and I came up with this poem about one of my favorites, Plan 9 from Outer Space. I hope Ed Wood, bless his memory, would have enjoyed this for the tribute to him that it is. Thank you for all the entertainment, Ed!

Who Else But Ed?


Who but Ed Wood could take two brief film clips
of an aging, ailing Bela Lugosi
and from this craft an alien invasion

spearheaded by a drag queen actor
who looked bored by the whole thing
as he sat behind his wooden desk
amid curtains and junky 1950s
radio equipment, giving orders
to his two inept crew members

all in a plan, the ninth such,
to take over planet Earth
by reviving the dead
and building an army of zombies

led by a chiropractor slinking around
with a cape covering his face
presuming to fill the late Lugosi's shoes,
with his zombie wife, Vampira
in her too sexy for burial dress,
and Tor Johnson, the Swedish Angel,
whose face was so scary
it became a popular Halloween mask?

Who else could get a Baptist church
to fund such a venture in filmmaking
in exchange for baptisms of cast members
and the promise of huge profits?

Who but Ed Wood, decades after his death in obscurity,
could have us watch so raptly in our darkened rooms
black and white television images
of Los Angeles under siege
by flying hubcaps, pizza pans and paper plates?

Who else would make us wonder
if this ninth plan by an advanced alien race
was so lame, what the first eight plans
might have been? - Jeff Barnes