The Ballad of Darryl O'Day

I wrote The Ballad of Darryl O'Day in the mid-nineties in response to a challenge to write a beer-drinking poem. I've performed the piece dozens of times including in theatrical settings and at a national performance poetry competition (I scored well).

I have a half-dozen other pieces of this rousing sort of narrative poetry. This one has been my most popular.

The Ballad of Darryl O'Day

There’s a legend that’s told in the neighborhood pubs,
In the smoke-filled gin joints and the posh country clubs,
In the places beer flows, be it froth or in dregs,
They say Darryl O’Day is the king of the kegs.

Now Darryl was sixty but still keeping fit;
His house by the brewer kept a hose joined to it.
With his kidneys still fearsome, his balance still fine:
When he chewed on a grape he could spit it out wine.

Yet, a decade had past since he’d fought for his title
And a rumor went ’round that Darryl ‘d grown idle.
Soon a brewhead named Stuart came after his throne.
From outside Darryl’s window he made his claim known.

He cried to the world, “It’s come time to acknowledge,
A new king’s in town, I’m the champ of my college.
I maintain Darryl’s finished, his panties are silk.
His head’s full of glue and he drinks buttermilk!”
Darryl hadn’t much words and had even less fear,
He said, “Let’s settle this now, I’ve a brewery right here.”

But Stu didn’t answer: his visage fell flat.
He drank from the hose then he turned and he spat.
First his face gave a twitch, then his neck made some twists,
His eyes became snakes and his hands became fists.

What was stewing in Stu only Stuart could say.
“This sissy-stuff brew, I could drink it all day.
If you want a real test,” Stuart sneered in his anger.
Then you’ll come meet me down at the aeroplane hangar!”

What could Darryl do if not take up the bait?
With the town at his side he went after his fate.
He marched out to the hangar to meet with his peril:
A foul bubbling cauldron, a twelve foot beer barrel.

‘Twas an ale beyond pale, ’twas a beer so unfit,
It wore through the tongue that swore upon it.
A fermented, demented toxic waste lager
Made part from old boots, and part gutter declogger.

Stuart paused to inhale, and then, licking his chops,
With a skip and a jump he went after those hops.
He chugged down eight quarts, and a pint and a gulp
‘Til his legs turned to rubber, his brain to a pulp.
Soon swaying, displaying his snarl with a gat,
Still standing, demanding, said, “Darryl beat that.”

Darryl sucked in his belly and tightened his bladder
Then strolled to the wall where he set up a ladder.
With pretzel in teeth he climbed up to the rafters:
The crowd half in cheers and the other half laughter.

His mouth opened widely, the daredevil Darryl
Took a leap from his perch to plunge into the barrel.
He drank as he swam and he swam as he drank
He made it look easy while draining that tank.
On down to a puddle he guzzled and slurped
Then said, “What, no more?” out of grieving, he burped.

Then he sucked dry his clothes until no longer damp.
Just one drip remained: he who challenged the champ.
The crowd at first gasped, then hoorayed with a clangor
And even Stu cheered from the floor of the hangar.

Throughout this wide world you’ll find fools who are talky
But there’s damned few out there who can walk the Milwaukee.
So, wherever men teeter with wobbly legs
They say Darryl O’Day is the king of the kegs.

Along with poetry, Martin Hill Ortiz is the author of three mystery novels and nearly fifty published short stories.

More of his work can be found through mdhillortiz.com

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Three Strange Rejections

Writing and sending out manuscripts for decades now, I've had my share of rejections. From the submission tracker Duotrope, I am told that my 14.3% acceptance rate is higher than the average for those authors who have sent to the same publications. Still that means 85.7% rejection.

In the past two months, I've had three unique rejections. 

First, for my short story, The Horse Whistle, I was sent a standard rejection notice. Two days later, I received an unrejection notice, apologizing for the first. One week after that I received a final rejection notice, this time being told it was final. My first ever unrejection became a rejection.

I sent my short story, WTF, to freeze frame fiction in March 2015. It was accepted. And then nothing happened. This is not too unusual, projects, even those with good intentions, sometimes die. I sent the piece out five more times. Two acceptances and both of those journals expired before publishing. I began to feel the story was cursed. Then in August 2021, six-and-a-half years after it was accepted in freeze frame fiction, I was told the project was back on track. And there I am, first in the table of contents.

Finally, I sent a poem to the Milwaukee Irish Fest poetry contest back in July. I didn't win the contest which was decided in August, and that's not a big deal, only one winner. Today, I received in the mail a handwritten note from one of the judges, all the more surprising because I entered the contest electronically:

Dear Mr. Ortiz,

[Name redacted] here of the Milwaukee Irish Fest poetry contest. This is a very tardy acknowledgement of and thank you for "You're Never Too Old to be Young."

Your poem is very refreshing in style and content: a true ribald ballad that would bring down the house in Irish pubs around the world.  

Thank you

--- ----

Any acceptance is better than any rejection, but I suppose going out of the way to snail mail a sympathy note is a fine gesture. 

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Two Mistakes - the unused prologue.

No Apologias.

As described in yesterday's post, Two Mistakes is an epic narrative poem, an update of Shakespeare's A Comedy of Errors. It is metered, traditional verse, intended as the equivalent of a musical, albeit, without music. It won second place in the Tom Howard/Margaret Reid Poetry Competition.

Here is the press release. 
Here is the poem.

I wrote a prologue/apologia for this piece which I did not include as part of the finished work. In submitting metered verse, I have received rejection notices suggesting I should forgo rhyming. The editors state it is juvenile and have specifically recommended that I write non-rhyming verse, chiding me as though my choice were accidental or else that I could do nothing but rhyme.

So I wrote this prologue/apologia as an introduction. It has a different and less stringent rhyme structure while maintaining the same anapestic rhythm with four feet. It was intended to declare my intent for this work: "This Error of Comedies, freshened, domestic, / Is a poem for the age of the musical stage."

I dropped this. Never explain or apologize.

Prologue and Apologia

With their most sacred sneers all the cravenly brave
Seek to plunder the poet in corpus and name.
His bones have been tumbled so often you'd think
That by now they'd invest in a crank for his grave.

But a rose is a rose and a spade is a spade,
The first graces a tomb while the other exhumes.
Like a grave-robbing thief, I pass time with the ghouls.
I have learned all their rules, I know how this game's played.

So I spirit his carcass and spirit to Hades
With a psychopomp's purpose, or else merely pompous.
The bard disembodied, by God, is more bawdy.
He arrives at Elysium mashing the ladies,

Then, encountering Falstaff, they flag down a whore.
I snatch up his bones: dented anvil and humerus.
He abandoned a parchment, its stories displayed
In arrays of tattoos on the skin he once wore.

I start rolling his bones under threat of the snake eyes
Peeking out from their lair, a dark hole in the earth.
Raising toasts with a cider from Eden's lost garden,
I stare down the serpent with pinched half-awake eyes.

This Error of Comedies, freshened, domestic,
Is a poem for the age of the musical stage.
It keeps beat with four feet much like Rogers-Astaire -
If not as majestic, at least anapestic.

Mea culpa et culpa et maxima -gulp-
Must be something I et to inspire such regret.
With a fire in my belly and pasty eye jelly
I am powdering bones as I consecrate pulp.

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Two Mistakes - The Tom Howard/Margaret Reid Award Winning Poem

 Two Mistakes: A Non-Musical Musical.

My epic, narrative (warning: very long) poem, Two Mistakes took second place prize in the Tom Howard/Margaret Reid Poetry Competition. I believe it is among my best works.

Here is the press release. 
Here is the poem.


The idea for this came to me after reading A Comedy of Errors. I couldn't help but feel Shakespeare missed the better themes inside the story.

In brief summary, Shakespeare wrote about a pair of identical twins separated when they were very young by a violent storm at sea. One set of twins were slaves, one set were masters. One master and one slave were rescued and returned home to their native city of Ephesus. The other child and his slave were rescued by a different boat and were seemingly forever lost. The lost twins, who grew up in a free state, were unaware of their siblings. They go on a mission that takes them to the Ephesus. Mistaken identities ensue.

Shakespeare was often ahead of his time regarding themes. On other occasions he was a product of his time. It seemed to me that the question of nature versus nurture was left unexplored and that the consequences of slavery is not dealt with. I transplanted the piece, beginning it in the 1820s in Louisville, Kentucky, a city at the border of North and South. A steamboat explosion along the Ohio river separate the pairs of twins. One child and slave are rescued and taken back to their home in Kentucky, a slave state. The corresponding pair are placed in an ash tub as part of their rescue. They wash down the river to where they arrive in Troy, Indiana. There, they are raised by an abolitionist family. Twenty years later, circumstance leads the twins who were raised by abolitionists to go to Louisville where they encounter those raised by slave owners.

Although my piece retains some of the farcical nature of the original, it also undertakes a serious exploration of the nature of slavery and how the institution destroys both slave and slaveholder.

The poem is presented in metered verse. I envisioned my piece as being the book to a "non-musical" musical.

Main Characters, abbreviated for the purpose of this excerpt:

Annie and Frances. Identical twin sisters born to the Sharper family, Louisville.

Anthony and Remmy Cobb. Identical twin slaves, purchased as a birthday gift for Annie and Frances. Remmy is renamed Moses after his adoption.

Demetrius Darling, An abolitionist living in Troy, Indiana who rescues and raises Remmy and Frances.

Selections from the story.

At one year of age, the two pairs of twin are separated from each other after a steamboat explosion.

   It would never have burst were it tough as Old Hans:
   If the boiler 'd been forged from the flesh of its stoker.
   A hulk of a giant with brawn cast from bronze,
   His two hands vast as shovels, his fingers like pokers.
   But the steam pipes were brittle, their knuckles corroded.
   With a blast of hot steam a bolt ripped from a seam.
   The pressure increased and then soon overloaded.

Remmy, the slave, and Frances, both one-year-old are set inside a tub used to collect ashes and launched down the river before the steamboat finally sinks. Amidst rain and hail, they drift down the river.

   Enduring a rite that was grimly baptismal
   The two in the tub got a rude sort of christening.
...
   The river, unwilling to choose between sides,
   Sent the ark ever westward, their fates undecided.
   To the river, it mattered not whether they died.
   It remained apathetic to lands it divided;

They are rescued by Demetrius Darling, a Quaker and abolitionist. They are raised to adulthood in a free land.

In the 1840s, Demetrius loses the deed of his farm to a swindler from Louisville. Of Demetrius:

   In a wreckage of shadows, alone and alone,
   His soul crumbled to dust and then sifted through floorboards.
...
   Now, he wept at the thought he would soon lose this place,
   Shedding tears for the land where he buried his wife.

Anthony and Frances journey to Louisville to settle their father's account. Anthony goes disguised as a slave; Frances is disguised as a man.

Meanwhile, at the Sharper family estate, Annie (the twin of Frances) has mixed feelings regarding her pending arranged marriage to a pompous aristocrat. While reading Thackeray:

   Without breaking her rhythm she switched from her book
   To her grievances, "Dare and the world always yields?
   I'm just property." Anthony shot her a look.
   "To daddy, I'm merely some crop from his fields.
   To be bartered for status.

Of course, her slave Anthony is more the prisoner. As he polishes the piano:

   Each key thumped as he rubbed in a smudge of bees' wax.
   He began at the bass end, the throatier notes.
   Tensions peaked then released as he scaled whites and blacks.
   Bitter tones were relieved by their sweet antidotes.
   There were candle snuff notes that could put out a flame.
   Some delivered a shiver without a deliverance.
   There were notes for emotions that no one could name.
...
   [the] Notes were steep steps on his way to the gallows.
   Once the last key was beat, his ascension complete,
   The piano lid dropped with a jolt swift and shallow.

The stage is set. When Moses and Frances arrive, mistaken identities create a storm of problems ending in a duel and a perilous flight to freedom.

The Unused Prologue to Two Mistakes

Louisville, 1846

A Predator's Game, now available, Rook's Page Publishing.

 -----------------------

Back page blurb.

Manhattan, 1896.

When the author Arthur Conan Doyle meets Nikola Tesla he finds a tall, thin genius with a photographic memory and a keen eye, and recognizes in the eccentric inventor the embodiment of his creation, Sherlock. Together, they team up to take on an "evil Holmes." Multi-murderer Dr. Henry H. Holmes has escaped execution and is unleashing a reign of terror upon the metropolis. Set in the late nineteenth century in a world of modern marvels, danger and invention, Conan Doyle and Tesla engage the madman in a deadly game of wits.

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