Very pleased to announce that Zumwalt’s latest poem, Lettuce Rejoice! (The patriotic Cyclospora cayetanensis) was published today at New Verse News. Please visit. New Verse News is a wonderful concept providing news items as poetry: https://newversenews.blogspot.com/2026/08/lettuce-rejoice-patriotic-cyclospora.html (AI-generated graphic by NightCafé borrowed from New Verse News.)
Here is the third of Zumwalt’s revisions to his set of 10 poems in his Sassoon Collection.
iii. Blonde
Her head-weak thoughts that once eagerly gave way
To looks that leapt from eye to brain and into heart,
Weaving unconscious promises of love,
Are now thrust outward, dangerously heard from lips to air.
And he who has watched one world and loved it all,
Star-struck with blindness, an ensnared fiber of pity,
With feeble hopes of attracting a returning glance,
Now listens with his ear to the rambling noise.
— zumwalt (2011, revised 2026)
Admin’s Note: This is the third piece in Zumwalt’s ten-poem tribute to poet Siegfried Sassoon, The Sassoon Collection, originally written in 2011, recently revised. “Blonde” is loosely based on Sassoon’s “Blind.” It directly tracks Sassoon’s opening (“His headstrong thoughts that once in eager strife / Leapt sure from eye to brain and back to eye”) and his shift in perspective (“And he who has watched his world and loved it all”).
I am pleased to announce that one of Zumwalt’s poems, “Out of Schlitz,” has been published in Light, the premier online journal for light verse and the oldest and most widely recognized publication in the United States dedicated entirely to witty and humorous poetry. Please visit here: https://lightpoetrymagazine.com/poems-of-the-week/out-of-schlitz/
Text of poem as featured at Light is below.
Poems of the Week
by Zumwalt
“Schlitz Premium, a beer brand that traces its roots to Milwaukee in the 1840s and was once among the largest breweries in the country, is being put ‘on hiatus,’ parent company Pabst Brewing Co. confirmed Friday after Wisconsin Brewing Company announced it would brew the brand’s final batch later this month.”
—Fox Business News
With measured trends and spreadsheets came
those analysts who killed a name:
A brew that tastes of bowling shoes
Is poured out as financial news.
Pabst ran the math, it weighed the yield,
And marched the yeast right off the field.
As taste gets dated, margins shrink:
So bid farewell to Granddad’s drink.
But wait ten years, they’ll give us more
In high-gloss cans from every store;
They’ll charge a fortune for the thrill
Of drinking this fermented swill.
— Zumwalt (May 2026)
Published on May 25, 2026
================
Never one to walk away from controversy or beer, Zumwalt has also sent us a revised version of a free verse poem on this topic that he penned earlier last week:
When You’re Out of Schlitz
They have officially placed the yeast on hiatus,
a term previously reserved for exhausted child stars
and caught-on-mic morning show hosts.
Now, it is gracefully applied to a twelve-ounce can
that tastes predominantly of 1974 and bowling shoe rentals.
The pivot was, naturally, data-driven:
a team of strategists,
hydrating on premium energy drinks
marketed as performance optimizers,
determined the current legacy yield
could no longer justify an aging brew.
So now the fermentation tanks are quietly drained,
the hops offered a highly competitive severance package.
It isn’t a termination, the press release insists,
just a strategic realignment.
Perhaps in a decade, they will exhume Schlitz
in a slim, matte-finish can
and rebrand it as a premium heritage artifact
for postal codes that treat commercial failure
as a high-end aesthetic.
Until then, we must manage the sudden loss
of this reliably unglamorous liquid as
the last can is flattened against the concrete.
–Zumwalt (May 2026)
With apologies to Emily and the DOJ
Release the files but just in part —
Deception’s Pathway lies
Too raw for Headline’s hungry Spark
The whole would scandalize
As Cards dealt from some hidden Deck
With watching eyes confined
The Truth must flame out gradually
To hide the Guilt entwined —
–zumwalt (2025)
carried away
i now cannot say that this
is not what i cannot say
i keep quiet
carefully
counting out
the contrast
of continuous quietness.
— Zumwalt (06/1991)
Why can it not last?
You’re like a rhyming haiku:
Too much, much too fast.
— Zumwalt (2011)
EDITORS NOTE: This particular short poem, received from Zumwalt last night via email, seems to have meaning at multiple levels, as one would expect. This quasi-haiku could be about one’s lifespan, the duration of a relationship, possibly the duration of a passionate encounter, or very possibly, due to Zumwalt’s interest in physics, about the relatively short life of a super-massive star, the brief duration of artificial atomic elements (like ununoctium which has a half life of less than a thousandth of a second) or the very brief duration of a subatomic particle (the Xi-sub-b referred to in “science delivers” lasts less than a billionth of a second.)
All that said, it seems the poem has some literal meaning, also. Zumwalt subscribed to an automated feed from a haiku blog. Soon Zumwalt was receiving one low quality haiku after another, each apparently written rather hastily. The final straw, it seems, was when Zumwalt received a rhyming haiku. This poem, along with Zumwalt “un-subscribing” to the automated haiku feed, was the result.
What am I but a commercial painter
making the same strokes over and over on black velvet nap
always charging the same prices
always settling for less
I know you, too,
paint the same pictures over and over
that’s how I can sell you mine.
— Zumwalt (1991)
nominal thought
Without forms, phones and Facebook,
there’s not much need to have a name when you’re dead.
— Zumwalt (2011)
idioverse
jack be nimble
jack be quick
but man, the fates cry like babies in soiled diapers, don’t try to be
jack —
it might stick.
-zumwalt (1990)
I want her to throw away the anchor.
She wants me to go overboard with it.
-zumwalt (1991)
