My Letter to You
Bounce passes for my team
Break the press
Silent scream

Dailiness
Much time alone
No computer
Little black cell phone

Dailiness
Taxi train
Tragedy?
Purple Rain

Dailiness
Mustard seeds
Mystery
Indeed. Indeed.

     Take heed.

I fear my own intensity
Help me dailiness
I have a need to fight
And a need to fly

O Life! Please protect my wife.
Help me dailiness
Be more practical
Battle back the lie

Glad to be in Maryland
Down on Main Street
Not far from Baltimore
I remember Life of Pi

Please let Alex see
Judi too as well
Ain't no tongue can tell
Purple goes the sky

         Ay! Ay! Ay!

dailiness, please, dailiness
one step at a time

sunshine again today
ordinary sublime

My uncle is so funny
I miss my childhood fun

Carolina sunny
Boston Born to Run

                One.

Love feels so good, so good
It comes and then it goes

Generosity
The kind that gives and knows

Today I clean a bit
Check in and reassure

Love is dailiness
May the dailiness endure!

Gone unto Heaven

Unto the Heavens she hath gone
Leaving me with an only bun
My mother has passed away
So got no more time to work on clay
With her death, time recalled all hert past
While I sailed alone in a boat with one mast
I remembered all what she didwithout a fee
And how much she eagerly wished to see me
Her words are still alive in my mind
A lady like her is so hard to find
So mother rest in peace
We all miss you even my niece

Sam Burton


Today is Friday, Oct. 3, the 275th day of 2014 with 90 to follow.

The moon is waning. Morning stars are Jupiter, Mars and Uranus. Evening stars are Mercury, Neptune, Saturn and Venus.f



In 1950, the Peanuts comic strip by Charles M. Schulz was published for the first time.

In 1959, The Twilight Zone, with host Rod Serling, premiered on U.S. television.

In 1967, Thurgood Marshall was sworn in as the first African-American justice of the U.S. Supreme Court.



A thought for the day:



The upward course of a nation's history is due in the long run to the soundness of heart of its average men and women. -- Queen Elizabeth II





Quotes for the day:



A black cat crossing your path signifies that the animal is going somewhere.

------------------------

A child of five would understand this. Send someone to fetch a child of five.

------------------------

A hospital bed is a parked taxi with the meter running.



J. Marx





Every instance of heartbreak can teach us powerful lessons about creating the kind of love we really want.

Martha Beck





"With the exception of women, there is nothing on earth so agreeable or necessary to the comfort of man as the dog."



Edward Jesse



"Efforts and courage are not enough without purpose and direction."



John F. Kennedy



"All you need is the plan, the road map, and the courage to press on to your destination."



Earl Nightingale





Poetry


PLAYBACK



Lauren Camp



Let there be footfall and car door. Let me
be finished with fire. Let
the man get on a plane for his morning
departure, erasing each reverie. Soon
there will be only daylight,
maybe a blue envelope, torn. Maybe bracelets
of color from the petunias. I will need
to know how to recover
the familiar, how to open the door
in the evening. How to again lock it.
Almost everything about me goes unspoken,
but commas and colons. I live with this
heart rate, multiple times, its direction,
its tempo: my 4/4 with acceleration, sometimes
tuned to an alternate signature. Think of Brubeck's
"Take Five." Those blocky chords were the result
of an accident-dead on arrival, they said,
after he smashed to the surf. Think how
he switched it around, made his hands
do what he wanted to hear, and forgive me
for the analogy. May I never
rush a surge for a better experience.
Every Sunday all over the country,
apologies gather. When I'm not in this
small cottage, unreacting, I cascade sound
and a few sentences from a cramped
room to whoever will listen. I know some
people think it is sinful to love such temptations,
but I stay with my face soft against
microphone, announcing my moral
directions. Sometimes, I'm convinced my blood
needs all those crossings. I'm not after
absolution. The man I love taught me to want
without lyrics. Remember I haven't
gone anywhere. I'm in a thirsty way
sort of possessive. I shouldn't show you this
side of myself. Try to remember I'm also praised
for my kindness. We each need to learn
to turn off some dreams so we can play
hours without creases.


About this poem


"Sometimes my poems are clearly focused on a single topic, but more and more they seem to need to be about many things because that's how I experience the w orld-so much going on all the time. Given the chance, I'll always try to make c onnections-in this case between jazz, love, humanity and potential error."
-Lauren Camp

About Lauren Camp


Lauren Camp is the author of "The Dailiness" (Edwin E. Smith Publishing, 2 013). She hosts "Audio Saucepan," a global music/poetry program on Santa Fe Public R adio, and lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

*
The Academy of American Poets is a nonprofit, mission-driven organization, whose aim is to make poetry available to a wider audience.


(c) 2014 Lauren Camp.
Distributed by King Features Syndicate




Health and Beauty Tip



No matter what kind of ****** cleanser you use, check what kind of water you have access to. Hard water can be just as detrimental to skin as plain soap, and can dry it out.



JOKES



Toddler Property Laws



1. If I like it, it's mine.

2. If it's in my hand, it's mine.

3. If I can take it from you, it's mine.

4. If I had it a little while ago, it's mine.

5. If it's mine, it must never appear to be yours in any way.

6. If I'm doing or building something, all the pieces are mine.

7. If it looks just like mine, it's mine.

8. If I think it's mine, it's mine.

9. If I... Oops! I'm sorry, I goofed! Instead of typing in the Toddler Property Laws, I've been typing in Bill Gates' primary business plan.





Phone Call



A young boy answers the phone.

A man says, "Hello is your dad around?"

The boy whispers, "Yes."

The man then asks if he can talk to him.

"He's busy at the moment," the boy whispers.

"Then is your mom there?"

"Yes" the boy whispers.

"Can I talk to her?"

"No, she's busy," the boy whispers.

"Is there anyone else there?"

"Yes" whispered the boy.

"Who?" the man asked.

"A policeman," came the whispered reply.

"Well, can I talk to him?"

"He's busy too," the boy whispered.

"Is there anyone else there then?"

"Yes" whispered the boy.

"Who then?" the man asked.

"A fireman," the boy whispered.

"Can I talk to him?"

"No," the boy whispered, "he's busy."

Annoyed, the man asked what they were all doing.

"Looking for me." the boy whispered.





Hard Working?



A business owner decides to take a tour around his business and see how things are going. He goes down to the shipping docks and sees a young man leaning against the wall doing nothing.

The owner walks up to the young man and says, "Son, how much do you make a day?"

The guy replies, "150 dollars."

The owner pulls out his wallet, gives him $150, and tells him to get out and never come back.

A few minutes later the shipping clerk says to the boss, "Have you seen that UPS driver? I left him standing around here?"



Presidential Quotes



"If Lincoln were alive today he'd roll over in his grave." --Gerald Ford (president, 1974-77)

---

"A friend of mine was asked to a costume ball a while ago. He slapped some egg on his face and went as a liberal economist." --Ronald Reagan

---

"I want to make sure everybody who has a job wants a job." --George Bush





Football and Confession



Years ago, the chaplain of the football team at Notre Dame was a beloved old Irish priest.

At confession one day, a football player told the priest that he had acted in an unsportsmanlike manner at a recent football game. "I lost my temper and said some bad words to one of my opponents." "Ahhh, that's a terrible thing for a Notre Dame lad to be doin'," the priest said. He took a piece of chalk and drew a mark across the sleeve of his coat.

"That's not all, Father. I got mad and punched one of my opponents."

"Saints preserve us!" the priest said, making another chalk mark.

"There's more. As I got out of a pileup, I kicked two of the other team's players in the . . . in a sensitive area."

"Oh, goodness me!" the priest wailed, making two more chalk marks on his sleeve. "Who in the world were we playin' when you did these awful things?"

"Southern Methodist."

"Ah, well," said the priest, wiping his sleeve, "boys will be boys."




Have a super nice Friday and a very dazzling weekend!

falling into subterranean sleep, I notice such blackness
   bypasses a pinprick of light; dreams are avenues
   to enigmas presenting themselves as someone forgotten.
sleep laves labyrinths with incandescent sequins.
    everybody is strange here, interlocutor commune,
still yet nothing I can understand – better be braille, or
    contrapuntal dance, but still you uttered nothing;
your locutionary silence seeks no contentment.

                                           i have never heard such riot
of laughter toss me out of sleep. perhaps it was our undoing,
   our deepest, secretive entrails unloosen us in such fashion
   worth depicting as obscenely courageous, the width
of arm-span the size of outstretched islands, and stepping into
   that particular wideness, are my small feet traipsing
   swiftly throbbing in the heat of choosing:
to go      or     to stay – cyclic spectacle that eschews
            dailiness that I know I may have forgotten you in faces
of lampposts, the pared skin of onion, the gleaming washlines,
     the white feral on the rooftops, a blank piece of paper,
            a munificent Bulacan sky, or any sky at that since
they are all bleached and they arrive not with wind but
    with lashes: the color of white that flagellates, that blinds,
        that oscillates in space which is then reduced to the
     back of my hand: I know this. I know all of this.

                                                we were not naked, yet something
         buried in the skin reveals itself disarmed, mumbling
             an earnest palaver of questions I have no answers for.
                     what happened? where are we? should we just – die?
                                   an echoing reverb, or simply a song – a metronomic
          carousal of swan-song I have heard before persists
                            and maybe all this time,
                                                       we have been awake, in separate cities.

A coincidence. Not a cause.
Just a coincidence.

Dailiness please.

The steps of dailiness
Are steps down Franklin Street

Bus rides and basketball
Students too to meet

Be strong my anxious heart
Be quick my weary feet

Do your best before you rest
No surrender. No retreat.

solidarity with my little town
not a man of much renown

              goin' down

no purpose, just dailiness
   work, family, music, rest
        no great goal is good, I guess
                  less is more, more is less

Please for dailiness
Help me take it slow.

Courage, calm, and caring
The anxiety will ebb and flow.

            Seeking. On we go.

Writing to you
  made me endure the boring dailiness.

Writing to you
  made me forget my sorrows for a while.

Writing to you
  was like painting with my heart.

Writing to you
  was like loving you with my words.

I should never have stopped.

verily this evening, from the veranda
i smell the fragrance of their arrivals.

the tall, slender, stockinged women
swaying like bamboo in the wind.

the admirals in white commandeering
vessels — the shear of wind, a tractable beast.

the ploys of men to woo the darling,
  the hesitations of dames cloaked
in obvious handiwork of skirts.

they slalom through life's rugged streets
like blueprints of doors revealing
  benign propaganda.

it is all too real to me. i have lived
behind the shadow of words.

it is all that i am cut up for — doting on
it still, yet a nonexistent blossom.

hearing them leave the interior of walls,
soldering the notoriety of burdens.
witnesses drowned in water,
their muffled voices reinvent the quietude. there is a dailiness overmastered by them, such rampant
mendaciloquence denied by me.

i move past cataracts of crowds
and hunt for the silence: this importunate need that feeds my bloodthirsty being.
i awaken the sleeping prowess
of words and listen to them.

now, leave me with my ocean.
i was meant to ***** in the blue
and froth like the last of unburied water,
  dreaming of fish.

dailiness: my response to depression
                 slow going
               one at a time

After years you know this:
that the course of reliable love runs
not through a slough of habit

but along a curving hillside
where even familiar landscape
offers daily surprises.

Those palms, those pine trees
outside the window, that stretch
of shoreline, this sleeping face,

so surprisingly familiar, still
catch you unawares in
a shock of recognition.

What you have done before
you do again:  you say yes.
You wake, and turn, and are thankful

to rise even from the happiest dream
into what, solid, factual, still strange,
you keep choosing.

Practice makes more deliberate
the thing you’ve done a thousand times,
each time an act of consent:

you pour the coffee
you feed the cat
you turn off the bedside lamp,

loving the simple labors
of shared life, loving
the changing light, evening and morning

and the currents of dailiness that run
deep under the whitecaps
and the waves.

Please dailiness.
Not the grandiosity.

Gratitude
No need for animosity.

Parenthood.
Focus.  Care and focus.

A little good
Amidst the hocus pocus

              guidance.

Sometimes weird mystical things
So help me dailiness
Try to organize my place
Call my dad. Clean my car.

A coincidence, not a cause
Stephen Spielberg's Jaws
Summer rains, spring thaws
The moon beyond the star

                 El Mar!

I want to be free.
Confusion!
I feel I'm lost
Every day is a copy of the day before
Sometimes worse!
Dreams are lost in dailiness
My dreams are not as great as before
The worst thing is not what I am now
That is I can't even remember
Who I dreamed to be.

Lost in dailiness
A prisoner in time and place
My dream is now
to be free from
The jail of time and place

without words
and their wondrous servitude,
i would only be
and cease to become.

as in a forest,
i shall then continue to flower
in the sharpness of swan-song.
like a beast dazed
into nothing and its bafflements,
even the triviality of a lone stone
shall vagabond through me
in a thousand days that pull
downward, refusing to reveal themselves and their paradisiacal nuances. their etymologies
star their deaths to a languid crawl towards an empty page.

all words trapped, slurring
in the radiant void, unbecoming of themselves and who i am.
if i am to be without poetry,
my then epiphanies would be scaled down to an epitaph's weight and its proper terrors;
   to think that i cannot write anymore, weave anymore these words,
    reeks of deathlessness, and i,
  communing through the myriad dailiness of things shall exist only to be,
   and not become  ( as a single star is meaningless in the coruscation of the multitude - a constellation without moniker,
  a god rid of sobriquet,
as a carpenter without tools,
   orr an army without arsenals)
i am things vaguely not.

god forbid, if i am to be
  without poetry,
what will i become, unknowing of
its grave rescue? these marvels
shoot off in the temporal flight
   of this splendid fate, and if without words, then this shall only be, still afloat, a wild, directionless flight.

this is another form I would like to lose
   but what is a man to inherit but the empire of sleep after
being caught in a virulent web of dailiness?
                sometimes dreams are as empty as Manila
  on a Sunday – requiring things I do not understand,
  so as the departure of leaves to bring back the same existence,
   the parallel rawness, and the exact hundredfold inflorescence,
   a blank synthesis of light is another conundrum
                  as sidewalks remain steely and squalid
  holding themselves up to surrender; when another drone breeds
      sound from a distance, one is reminded of how gently songs in themselves
  break inward and release fully, a cloud of regret, leaving things and renaming
  them loose sobriquets;
                  and when all else have gone into total darkness
   I will sit beside everything else that closes its eyes to the world
   and rejoin them in the familiar and see nothing but the rest
      of beautiful things ignite to show scars and leave
       us all wordless, losing
                          this  strange  form of living.

Within I sense a silence
Too deep for any names
Unheard, Unseen, Unknown, Unless
It lingers and remains

Above, beyond, before, beneath
All words that humans speak
Searching ever always for
The other silent ones who seek

In solitude and dailiness
Apophatically Greek
Ascending Mt. Olympus
Mysteriously meek.

forever pledged love
hollowed out by dailiness
just snake skin remains

For a moment, I doubt your possibility. Like clues to a riddle
    filling its minor gaps. And then, from a seen distance,
    you sidle as if to arrive so sudden, yet slow with great impedance,
    an absence I am familiar of. Next to the sound of the not-so-distant
  I am deaf, wearing the same heavy mask of silence. In sequence,
  when we talk, I am pale wall, I am crumpled flower, I am riddance.
I am the many versions of bad dreams
  rolled in one, deep slumber. Easy it was the first time, when it was said
with precision, the things we were before, set loose in the air. Hard it was
now like a trick I have to unlearn forever. Alighting love a blind journey,
second sight as if responsibility. I watch myself wear out by much dailiness.

For a lifetime, I may, will it short so long then when I must
care less, the freedom, keep your face as instilment, memory, recall. You are
introduced without light; all the more I love the sight, so dark the enigma, gets
lost because distance always is telling of a long path – imprecise the steps, surety
   when feet fall, breaking the bones like twigs. I did not mean to disrupt
     your harmony – that is why dance is always a lack of another,
                             *“Catch the music, love, I must drop movement
   and seek your return.”

school, swimming lessons, summer camps
          football, fighting, feeding
                       domesticity

I ride the synchronicities
They strangely come and go
Rest from the anxieties
Staunton aglow in snow

Walk the way of dailiness
Movies, music, books
Buddhamind in Bangkok
Q and I tuk tuks

Scholem's astral body
Kabbalists in Spain
Sandor Marai in Budapest
Stephen King in Maine

Me in Mary's land
But lookin' way down south
My hands upon her hair
My words within her mouth

            Dixie Chicks!

for both humility and hunger
       honesty and wonder
                 dailiness

Life is our existence's continual essay, and the words we still in its premise are the repercussions of our dailiness. Should we find ourselves trapped in a moment, that is no period, no decimal - that is an ellipsis. And to continue on in the spire of our days, is our living's magical working.

let us not be devoid of value.
let us not be mired
into the stillicide of night.
let us

  become.

let us

   think.

let us prosper,
  burst
  with a light's amplitude
  beating the darkness.

let us become flesh
  and not the frailty of bone.
let us become the memory
  of our hands
  and not the pain of their labor.
let us not be the languor
  of air but
   the promised swoon of it -
this appassionata - this
  coming to ourselves
     in union with the soul's
  furtive hieroglyph - we will
  understand this when
   we cease
       to be
       and finally
         become!

it is like a juxtaposition to
idle trains of fading or
a transcendental manuscript.
death of a man foretold
in every syllable.
i could be gutted out of
and displaced into the dearth,
in doing the dailiness of this life.

in the eventide, when these
walls lurch in, sizing me down
in sleep's hyperbole - a mere chasm
or say, nothing but a gap in
continuity, there is something
that is within striking distance
when you first wrote:

"Truth naked as a shaved dog."

it is your mind's paradigm
that has passed a torch to light
my way through the labyrinth.
it is like your deaths take my deaths.
it is when you pursue the trellises
of all-telling lies that i take
to learning, the belligerence
of wars and the tearing of the heaven in midnight's augury.

it is like you are haplessly
trying to teach me something
without voice.
without life's syllabus.
the only common prognosis
is that i have a sediment of
your soul through litanies
and you do not know me nor
am i a captive in your peripheries.

the wind takes your words
with it -- limping like
wounded creatures or perturbed
unions of cicada, flying away
are also these words
searching for asylums.

For my friends on Franklin Street
And in our little town

Dailiness, dailiness
And true courage found

Thank you, Robert
God bless you too

Love is verb
And Love is noun!

The ambitious dreamer,
Fell in love
And obtained the flame.

Now, he's reined
In the scene of dailiness.

Woe, such rebellious spirit waned.

On the stage of his mind,
Emotionally drained.

It's just emotion within me
Kinda overflows
Jesuits in Seattle
Me in Reno snow

A little Chinese food
Boredinary blues
Wonder used books
This life that I will lose

Music in the bath tub
Up late at night
Paris on my honeymoon
2 green lights

Gonna watch Conclave
Gonna sleep till noon
Gonna call my son
My son is reading Dune

              dailiness ...