I am asleep dreaming as I write this poem. I remember one
young woman, but cannot remember her name. She has a
group of her friends in her living room. It is a Christmas
party. She is serving Christmas cookies and tea. She re-
cently got divorced. It is a happy-sad time. I have other
dreams inside the one I am having. Other girls I dated ln
junior high and high school. Others in college. Others as
I grew older. Sleeping with some for a night, others with
whom I lived with for years. All of whom I loved for hours
or for many Christmases. I never married, but was married
to all of them. Memories of many, movies and popcorn,
dinners of salads and pizza, birthdays and prime rib, trips
to Paris and Moscow, picnics in the the Flint Hillls, more
Christmas cookies I took on Christmas Eve to souls sub-
sisting, sometimes for years, at the State Hospital. No one
got tears but the pillows.

TOD HOWARD HAWKS

Words are wondrous. Somehow in fourth grade I read a biography of Noah Webster, who compiled and published the first dictionary of American English. That got me hooked. I have been a poet since my early 20s. Words are not to be used to be pedantic;  rather, they're chosen to be the 'precise" word, the exact word, to convey to the reader as chearly as possible what the poet wishes to convey. Words in a poem are chosen for their timbre, their tone, their color, their heft in a way similar to how Beethoven chose the exact note for the exact place in the work he was composing, the admixture eliciting the precise effect he wanted his work to have on his audience. I read dictionaries while others read detective stories. I am the only person I know of who reads a college book on English grammar for fun. Some of the words I enjoy using:  "meretricious" means ******;  '"veridical" means speaking the truth;  "threnody" means a song of lamentation;  "solipsistic" means egocentric;  "adjure" means to entreat;  "dithyramb" means a Dionysian choric hymn;  "mare's nest" means a hoax;  "phatic" means noise, but no substance;  "bootless" means futile;  "rebarbative" means grim;  "truculent" means surly;  "esprit d'escalier" means a witticism that comes after it could have been uttered;  "Stygian" means gloomy;  "surcease" (as a noun) means cessation;  "rubric" a category;  "meliorist" means a person who believes the world can be made better;  and "obloquy" means verbal abuse. Just memember, there's still the Oxdord English Dictionary (20 volumes).

Copyright 2020 Tod Howard Hawks

Tone Grant was a classmate of mine at Andover. I remember speaking to him in Oliver Wendall Holmes library as he was writing a paper. He was cordial. He was also starting varsity quaterback for Andover's football team. His hand and arm that wrote his paper was not what got him into Yale, but the same hand and arm that threw footballs so well were. Tone became an attorney, then served in Vietnam and was wounded. Later in life, he became president of Refco, at one time the largest independent futures trader in the U.S., where he owned roughly 50% of the company. Tone, along with others at Refco, was indicted, tried, and found guilty of defrauding investors of $2.4 billion and was sent to prison for 10 years. He died while in prison. To me, Tone's life was today's perfect example today of a Greek tragedy. Though he vehemently claimed his innocence, it seemed to me that $2.4 billion was a lot of money to explain away if one is charged and found guilty of defrauding investors. No human being is perfect, but Tone, in my opinion, should have thrown that pass out of bounds instead of having it intercepted by law enforcement.

Copyright 2020 Tod Howard Hawks

I'm not quite sure when I first realized I had this trait. The trait of which I speak is honesty, or to put it in a veranacular phtase, "no *******." Bullshitting is a sin against yourself;  it will rot your soul. For as long as I can remember, I have been unabashed, outspoken, unafraid to reveal my true self. For me, it is
exhilirating, reaffirming. For so many others, it is at best annoying, at worst anger-provoking. Most people are afraid to be themselves. Indeed, they go to great lenghts to disquise who they truly are, how they really feel--a kind of psychological make-up to conceal their real selves. Doing that puts them into their own prison. Bars have a dual function:  it keeps a person locked in, un-
consciously self-protected and "safe." And it keeps all others locked out, thereby ensuring no threat of scrutiny by others. But this duality keeps
the person who will go at great lenghts to create and maintain this illusory safety frozen forever. To be open, to be forthcoming, to be always my real
self, is for me liberating. It matters not to me what anyone thinks about what I say or do or am. What does matter, and will always matter most to me, is what
I think of myself. For if first i cannot be true to myself, I then cannot be true to the infinite Cosmos and everything in it. I am willing to die than become an apostate. I would rather be dead than be a liar. Before the firing squad pulls its triggers, the head might say to me "Stand a little to the left." And I would oblige him.

Copyright 2020 Tod Howard Hawks

Statues are not the problem. The problem is that we make statues
out of living people. We glorify then. We deify them. We worship
them. That they may inspire us is not the problem;  that we let them
turn us into little statues of themselves is perverse. If these living
people were truly worthy of adoration, or more, the would tell us
to look inside ourselves and find our own sacredness that we share
with all other creations in the Cosmos. "Join hands," the living
statues would tell us. "Love yourselves and thereby love all others."
All of us are divine. None of us warrant being cast into uncaring
bronze if ever we had turned a human being into a slave or murdered
millions in a genocidal wave westward. Embrace your innate di-
vinity and let your life be a monument to love.

Copyright 2020 Tod Howard Hawks

What is this business about paying for "suns"? Do we really need to
pay to promote ourselves, our poems, our treasures? Isn't this come-
on a form of self-prostitution? Are we pimps or poets? Did William
Blake buy ads in the newspapers of his time to promote himself? No,
he did not. He simply wrote the poems that came to him, and then
illustrated them. That it took 200 years for the rest of the world to
discover him and his work was no matter to him. Throughout his life,
he remained true to himself, a goal for eveyone who writes poetry.
And Emily Dickinson, she spent virtually everday of her adult life alone
in her bedroom writing some 1,800 poems in Amherst, Massachusetts.
Yet the poems she wrote came to her through the infinite universe.
Did she hire a P.R. firm to promote her work? Did she pay to have
more and more "suns" shine on her poems that were already brilliant?
No, she did not. And it was not until the 1950's that an academician
got hold of the original versions of her unique and transformative
poems and had them published. Perhaps unwittingly, perhaps on
purpose, if any of us poets become complaisant to the "pay and play"
of the world of poetry, we vitiate the worth of our work, and lose
the heart and soul not only of our poems, but also the import of
our very beings.

Copyright 2020 Tod Howard Hawks

Is it not ironic that millions and millions of American
heterosexual teenagers more than over a half century
ago fell in love under the spell of Johnny Mathis's
love songs? I was one of them, and today I begin each
day listening to him sing his magical songs on YouTube
while I drink two cups of coffee with milk (ratio: 1: 1)
to wake up. I, like most of you, have spent much of
my free time listening to enchanting love songs. Someone
once asked me if I had a hobby. I paused for a few
moments, then replied, ""Yes, I do have a hobby. My
hobby is collecting beauty--beautiful music, beautiful
memories, beautiful sunsets, and the like." I think the
best single singer of my lifetime, male or female, is
Johnny Mathis, who is still alive and performing as
I write this. Remember "Chances Are," "The Twelth
of Never," "Wonderful, Wonderful" among countless
others? The irony of which I spoke? Johnny is gay.

Copyright 2020 Tod Howard Hawks