Stars sprinkle the inky night sky
Like crumbs of diamonds on a still, midnight ocean.
I am not afraid to be here, alone,
In the vastness of twilight.
For these few moments, time is as long
As the space between those stars,
And as empty, too.
The uncertainty that sunrise will follow.
As sure as the sun is destined to rise everyday,
When there's only darkness surrounding you,
Pierced slightly by the silvery glow of moonlight...
You're all alone and helpless.
You only have the vague hope that the sun will return.
And as I sit here now, star-gazer,
Faceless nomad on the damp grass;
I feel immortal, and I am afraid
That I will always be alone with the stars.

It’s day seven of NaPoWriMo;
I have to write a fresh poem.
But it is also Monday
and I have no topic,
no inspiration.
So this feeble
nonet will
have to
do.

My married life
has a new ghost fix du jour—
a show called Haunted Collector
where John Zaffis pulls *****
historical do-dads out of haunted
domiciles, lines them up in bell jars
every harrowing episode.
His basement must be bursting
under the floorboards with EVP
chatter, ephemeral dead men
making residual trips down the hall
for midnight tuna-fish.

Last night we went down to Louisiana
in Deep South Paranormal
where a cast of drawling ghost hunters
cat-called the departed with backwater
truisms about cats and frissons.
Two bearded ZZ Top-types rattle
and shout through the Longleaf sawmill,
suffocated, chipped and abandoned.

But interestingly, our typecast yokels
take a new tactic beyond respect,
sympathy and confrontation. They play
their guitar for the undead, unleash
a melody, tempting the cryptic spirits
to step over the trimmers and chippers
and into the laser grids of square
lights, K2 meters, thermal camera frames,
the obelisk.

The peepings of ghosts have ceased
to ***** me. The proliferation
of paranormal pollsters
are crotchety and terrified,
modeling and grandstanding
the character American,
heirs of TV Kings and monsters,
castle builders, suffocating,
chipping away and abandoning
our very real screaming human
American creature.

A prose poem*

It’s all boarded up now, abandoned in the triangle of downtown Roy, New Mexico, but like a lost island named Capronea two-hundred forgotten years ago, I find myself back in the summer of 1977, seven-years old in the balcony of a second-run, small town movie house watching *The Land That Time Forgot in that small-town, movie-timeline kind of way: two years after everyone else. Popcorn brides, my cousins and I walked the movie processional during opening credits, almost missing the proverbial plummeting message thrown out to sea in a water cask. Candy-bored through all the world-war-submarine scenes, I perked up with innocent horror at the spreading circle of blood in the river, rifles shooting into a gaping dinosaur mouth. And the thunk of its neck hitting the deck. Years later I come back to the epic on classic TV. This time I notice the wobbly love story, German metaphysics arguing with British empiricism that lasts only one flirty scene. Now I’m shocked and a little dismayed over how little screen time the dinosaurs actually get, their three Shakespearean scenes, how I still feel all the same heartache as they enact their long and dramatic death throes. Doug McClure is alright, I guess, except that his hair is always blown out to an impossible feathered confection, just like the German Captain who keeps his hat on way past when this is necessary or useful. We laugh with ironic smugness at the stiff Jurassic puppets and the blood on rubber, the convolution of the island’s evolutionary biology. Those river amoebas are a hoot! Oh, the ironic wink that double-crosses itself in the end, an irony that is really homesickness longing for sincerity, simplicity. My husband says he prefers this movie to those Spielberg ones. I give him hell about this but later come around to see his point. Let’s take the movie’s basic premise: we are at the end of history presumably. So even if we could forget all that history, wipe the slate clean as it were, we still wouldn’t get along with our rivals. At least not enough to fashion an oil refinery from sticks and stones, pack up all that oil in barrels, and roll on outa this nightmare.

None of us will get off this island alive. At the end we’re left crossing a mountain of ice with two people whose only hope is to simplify things down to survival and ***—and *** in those impossible furs no less (in dinosaur leather maybe). We can’t help but trip over the metaphors here. They're everywhere. Only back in 1977, we believed them.

An unrhymed Pindaric

“Either be wholly slaves or wholly free.”
-- John Dryden

I. Strophe**

Free verse, you are my original verse, my birth voice,
music of my inheritance, placenta full
of breath and heartbeats, my riotous word maps
shred of the rules of the patriarchy, the white
old world. Self reliance is All American, I say;
I say what I mean like daggers on blood stains, scientific
particularity, embellished with the subversive, diabolical
enjambment, a soothsayer and a liar, a sister assumed
in the interruption, a sister resolved
in the final line.

II. Antistrophe

But you can spin out in an open lot.
Who’s to say a sister can’t mark out her own
shape—skinny, fat, fit to be *******?
Who’s to say she can’t be obscure, obtuse, coquettish
with a song and dance or with raw, pickled reason?
There’s more to ****** than some two-faced
enjambs. There’s the rhetorics of ******* and assuming
you invented the knife. Can we just cut the game
of its gangrene?  Smelly history, politics,
and idolatry?

III. The Stand

I take back the music; I will sing badly in my parlor,
set a line with a waltz or a moon dance.
I refuse to relinquish my words to the tyranny of English.
I refuse to relinquish my words to the tyranny of me.
I take back all shapes (if they flatter me) and mathematics.
I take back the agenda nailed to the wall,
refusing to relinquish my self to the tired old generals
of either side. I take back the third waves of the entire sea
and shitbox and I take back the almighty decision
of which witch is which.

A Donna Summer Triolet**

The disco dancer needs a singer,
a heart spasm simmering with the pulsing zeitgeist.
The sequined torch song craves a *******;
so the disco dancer needs a singer.
Giorgio-beats-per-minute, the remix has been spliced
as the belladonna exits onto the dance floor of Christ.
The disco dancer needs a singer,
a 12-inch ****** blessing the joyous zeitgeist.

When he lays down
sushi on the pallet
it exhales a sigh

Paddle into rice
damp, caking sea
warm in the throat

Glistening with meditation
flesh of reds and white
dead beauty on wood

Using fingers
I am a bear and a wolf
stained with salt and soy

oh but my love is not
a red, red rose.
i chose to replace
every tear on my face
with dying embers
of every memory
you said you would remember.

i trust
that you must know
that i am not a summer's day,
i will never play
at being warm
or temperate.

you can berate
me for not knowing
whether i am to be
or not to be,
but forgive me
if i don't play by the rules
and exit
the right stage
in a wrong scene.

it just means
that your music
is not the food of my love.
i will continue to shove
your thoughts
under a carpet of denial.

do not throw away
any vial you might find
in my room,
you sealed my doom
when you stomped down
that staircase,
tripping on the last time
we went for a walk.

my face doesn't run
smooth like the course of love,
you should have known
this truth.

my eyes are not rose petals,
my heart not a white dove,
my love
when they say hell is empty,
they haven't been inside
my mind -
here
you'll find horrors
of a sweet kind.

(NaPoWriMo Challenge: April 3, 2019)

“Not all those who wander are lost.” -- J. R. R. Tolkien

I was an office temp for many years when I was young. All the companies: Kelly girls, Manpower, Adecco. I took innumerable tests in typing, word processing, spreadsheets.

The worst job was at a sales office for home siding. I logged complaints all day on the phone about faulty siding.

I worked at a construction site in Los Angeles, a new middle-class ghetto they were building on the Howard Hughes air strip. I worked in a trailer and had to wait until lunch break to walk a block to the bathroom in the new library.

There was one warehouse I worked in that had mice so employed a full-time cat to work alongside us. The cat left dead mice everywhere. I was always cold there.

A lot of places I was replacing someone on vacation, someone the office assumed was indispensable but there was never anything for me to do there but read. I wrote a lot of letters to pen pals and friends. Email hadn’t been invented yet. Sometimes I’d walk memos around the office. Nobody ever invited me to meetings. Be careful what you wish for. Sometimes it comes true and you end up sitting in endless meetings.

In one swanky office I prepared orders in triplicate on a typewriter. I kept messing up and having to start over. Eventually I started to enjoy this. It was a medical lab and was convinced they were doing animal testing so I left after a week.

One of my early jobs was as a receptionist in a war machine company. My contact there asked me to do “computer work” (as it was called then) but I didn’t know how to use a mac or a mouse. My contact called my agency to complain about sending out “girls without basic skills.” My agency told me not to worry about it, the war company was just trying to scam us all by paying for a receptionist to do “computer work.” So they stuck me at the switchboard up front where I found bomb-threat instructions taped under the desk.

I worked at a design store and learned a program called Word Perfect. I started typing and printing the letters to my friends. The St. Louis owner was trying to sell the company to a rich Los Angeles couple. Once, a young gay designer I admired called and referred to me as “the girl up front with the glasses.” I immediately went out and got contact lenses. Before I left, I bought a desk and a chair they were selling. Years later, I sold the desk to an Amish couple in Lititz, PA, but I still have the chair.

I once worked for a cheap couple running a plastic mold factory. The man was paranoid, cheap and houvering and I said I wouldn’t stay past two weeks. They asked me to train a new temp and I said okay. The new temp also found the owner to be paranoid, cheap and houvering and so declared to me she wouldn’t stay past the week either. She confided in me she had gotten drunk and slept with someone and was worried she was pregnant. She was freaking out because she was going through a divorce and already had two kids. I told her about the day-after-pill which she had never heard of. I don’t know if it worked because I never used it myself and I never saw her again after that to follow up.

At another office I did nothing at the front desk for three weeks, bored and reading all the Thomas Covenant novels. I would take my lunch break under a big tree to continue reading the Thomas Covenant novels.

I worked for months at a credit card company reading books and letting in visitors through the locked glass door. Week after week, the receptionist would call in sick. One young blonde woman would give me filing work. She was telling me all about her wedding she was planning which sounded pretty fun and it made me want to plan a wedding too. After a few weeks she asked me what my father did. I said he was a computer programmer. She replied that my dad sounded like somebody her dad would beat up. I was too shocked by the rudeness to say dismissively, “I seriously doubt that.” (For one, my dad wasn’t always a computer programmer.) When it became clear the woman I was replacing had abandoned her job, they asked me if I wanted to stay on. I said no, that I was moving to New York City. I wasn’t  (but I did eventually).

Some places “kept me on” like the mortgage underwriters in St. Louis. That office had permanent wood partitions between the desks, waist-high and a pretty, slight woman training to join the FBI. She fainted one day by the copier. It was there that I told my first successful joke ever. Our boss was a part-time Baptist minister and we loved him because he was able to inspire us during times of low morale. One day we saw a bug buzzing above us in a light fixture.  Before I even thought about it I said, “I guess you could say he finally saw the light.” Everybody laughed a lot and I turned bright red. I wrote my essay to Sarah Lawrence College there after hours at the one desk with a typewriter. My boss and I got laid off the same day. He helped me carry my things out to my car.

I worked at a large food company in White Plains, NY. I often came home with boxes of giveaway Capri Sun in damaged boxes. I helped a blind woman fill out her checks. She was really grouchy and I wasn’t allowed to pet her service dog. She had dusty junk all over her desk but she couldn’t see it to make it tidy. I realized then that she would never be able to use a stack of desk junk as a to-do list...because she couldn’t see it. You can’t to-do what you can’t see and how we all probably take this fact for granted with our piles of desk junk. Years later I had the same thought about to-do lists burned in phones or computer files.

They also “kept me on” at the Yonkers construction company. I was there for years. The British woman next to me was not my boss but she ordered me around a lot. She told me I looked like an old 1940s actress I had never heard of who always wore her hair in her face. I was annoyed by this compliment because when I looked the actress up on the Internet I could see it wasn’t true. At the time, everyone was just getting on the Internet and I was already addicted to eBay. I would leave meetings in the middle for three minute at a time to ****** items with my competitive late-second bids. It was my first job with email too, and I emailed many letters to all my friends all day long. One elderly man there thought it was funny to give me cigars (which I smoked socially at the time) and told me unsavory ****** facts to shock me. I thought he was harmless and funny and his attempts to unsettle me misguided because I had already grown up with two older brothers who were smelly and hellbent on unsettling me. Later the man started dating and seemed happier and I met his very nice older girlfriend at one of the laborious, day-long Christmas parties our Italian owners threw every year. Months later his girlfriend was murdered in her garage by her estranged husband. Most of the office left to go to her funeral and I felt very bad for him.

And they kept me on at the Indian arts school in Santa Fe. I loved every day I spent there, walking the halls looking at student art. I had never seen so many beautiful faces in one place. One teacher there confided in me about her troubles and I tried to be Oprah. She ended up having to take out a restraining order against a man she met online. At the trial, the man tried to attack the female judge and she awarded the teacher the longest restraining order ever awarded in Santa Fe: 100 years. He broke the restraining order one day on campus and we were all scared about where he was and if he had a gun. All around the school were rolling hills and yellow blooming chamisa and we found tarantulas in the parking lot. I was there almost a full school year until I moved away.

I was once a temp in a nursing temp office that had large oak desks and big leather chairs. The office was empty except for one other woman. The boss was on vacation and she spent all our time complaining about what an *** he was and how mistreated the nurses were. I remember feeling uncomfortable in the leather chair. The boss, who I never met, called me one day to tell me he had fired her and that I should know she was threatening to come back with a gun. When I called the agency they laughed it off. I told them I wouldn’t go back.

My favorite temp job was at a firefighting academy in rural Massachusetts. I edited training manuals along with two other temps. It was very interesting work. The academy was in the middle of the woods, down beautiful winding roads with old rock walls. Driving to work I would listen to TLC and Luther Vandross. And whenever I hear Vandross sing I still think of the Massachusetts woods. When I left, they let me have a t-shirt and I wore it for years. One of the trainers had a son who was a firefighter who asked me out on a date. I said I was moving to New York City (this time it was true) and not interested in a relationship. He insisted the date would be just as friends. He took me to Boston’s North End and we ate gnocchi while he told me how he didn’t believe it was right to hit women. This comment alarmed me. He then took me to a highrise, skyview bar downtown where he proceeded to **** my fingers. I thought about Gregg Allman and Cher’s first date where Gregg Allman ****** Cher’s fingers and how now Cher and I had something in common: the disappointment of having one’s fingers ******. My scary date didn’t want to take me home and I was living with my brother at the time, so I told him my brother was crazy and if I didn’t get back by ten o’clock my brother would freak out like a motherf&#$er. That part wasn’t true...but it worked. I made it home.

I used to be deathly afraid of talking to strangers on the phone. I used to be bored out of my mind watching the clock. I used to wish I were friends with many of the interesting people walking past my desk.

When I look back on all this and where I’ve been, it seems so random, meandering through offices in so many different cities. But it wasn’t entropy or arbitrary. I was always working on the same thing.

I was a writer.

In a suburban, Midwestern split-level, a piano teacher (just turned thirty),
leads an eleven-year old girl and her parents down eight shagged stairs
to the piano room illuminated by backyard sunlight from a sliding glass door.
**** has infested the entire room and a polka-dot-print couch with skirt ruffles
and a low brown coffee table create a makeshift waiting area.
This is where the parents sit writing out checks (the bank president’s daughter
was denied lessons last week for paying too late, too often). A faux-wood
sign slid into a gold-trimmed stand demands Please No Smoking but it’s only 1980
and too overbearing not to offend the parents. Smoke still ascends the ashtrays
atop their classy black uprights with chipped middle Cs.
Nobody in the neighborhood but the piano teacher has a metronome.  
She wears flowered blouses and is slightly overweight in a padded movie-like way;
she has fat, muscled fingers for playing all kinds of notes.
A stubby brown piano is piled with stacks of dog-eared songbooks.
The eleven-year old slouches over the keys attempting simplified Chopin, Bach,
and “Tubular Bells” from The Exorcist, simulating her close-ups for Solid Gold.
Every year there are recital awards, a scale-shaped silver hanger or a coffee cup
with a handle fashioned like a quarter note. One year they all memorize the lives
of the composers. One year the piano teacher is pregnant by a tall, awkward,
bearded husband who practices fencing out in their backyard. Today she tells
the eleven year-old about last night’s dreams where “Christ is holding her baby.”
The parents overhear this and close their checkbooks.

For twenty minutes my father argued with her about the end of my music career.
She acquiesced in the end, saying a girl should always obey her father.
Within the year my teacher did find fame in the papers by obeying her father,
the day he commanded her to steam-clean the crimson stains on the **** carpet,
the day after he shot and stabbed and set afire that awkward, bearded, fencing man,
father of the baby that dreamed-up Jesus was so fond of. And now when she takes
the 5th, I never know if it’s that Amendment or Beethoven’s.
                                                                ­                                       Please No Murdering
the perfect melody with your bars and keys. The piano teacher went on teaching scales
and I imagine her piano is festering like a box of echo and madness, notes floating
through the sliding glass door stuck ajar. I imagine her frumpy, stomping on the stiff
damper pedal that sustains all our dreams.

Real success indicators*

- Skill in the persuasive negotiations of terms, a kind of sedimentary geological persuasion
- Ability to conjure Oprah behind closed doors, talk downs
- Proficiency in juggling fire
- Possessing the gift of grasping the bigger picture metaphysically, spiritually on Sundays
- Facility with the in-crowd, a knack for small talk in lunch lines
- Talent for producing imaginative and influential spin for both external and internal corporate communications
- Competence in project management and setting expectations, ballet dancing
- Aptitude in translating poor self-esteem into long work hours
- Capacity for taking sht at all levels of the disorganization

She was kneading the crevice
under my left shoulder blade with a forefinger
which had a tremor when she pushed hard
or “did anything with intention.”
Said it was only her right finger, a family trait,
(honestly, not an ineffectively way to argue
with a muscle).

I could hear the voice of an old man on a table
behind the curtain. His relaxation was a confession,
(maybe the knee **** response to premeditated touch),
and I was like the otherwise engaged
priest. There was a surgery
and he was eight years addicted to pain
pills. One-hundred days sober now,
getting self care, (as Oprah would say),
he was enjoying his wife’s cooking again,
looking forward to some ice fishing
out at Eagle’s Nest, (something
he hadn’t done for 10 years).

“The canyon bowl is so quiet,” he said.
“Even if you don’t catch any fish,
you'd be content to sit there all day.”
“It’s Zen-like,” he said, “the ice caps
surrounding you, the elk and the coy-oats
frolicking out there on the ice.”
(Not with each other I presume.)
The old man’s masseuse
was a young man who never said a word
except, “Is the pressure too much?”

“It’s not like I have respect,”
the old man on the table continued,
“for those who get addicted to illicit drugs.
But now I have a great respect for the pain
they go through.” His masseuse and my masseuse
went on kneading.
“At least I have a life to go back to.”

For Valerie Harper**

You come into my house with your panache and polyester wraps.
You move across my floor with a defiant flow: the tips of your head
scarves and cresting bell-bottom sails. You are stubborn
like a lithe Lou and smartly sarcastic like your short
and **** Ida, like the heartache mothers and daughters
hand back and forth. You are New York
like a downstairs Indian eatery. You push me into trouble
when you call from the dates of the Me decade.
You show me your anger and your sweet new resignations.
You cover me like a new coat from the striking windows
of Hempel's. You are the most beautiful of all of us
and you let the Teds and Murrays of this world slowly
come to understand this. Although purple and warm
and Mediterranean with those door beads, your attic
is not where you will hide at the end.
You will be out on the sidewalks of Minneapolis
sitting in a chair shaking hands,
sitting in a chair and singing with me.

Childhood is a small town in Labyrinth County
with brothers and sisters and cousins, big-kid games
beyond the porch. Grandfolks sending you off into the fray.
Heather with her wavy hair, bellbottoms and confident wiles,
held the key to the perfect girl, unlocking boys
she could take and own. Me, little cousin
with doe eyes for such starlings who could perch
in the middle of cross streets, in the palm of the world.
With the eyes of heirs, she was witness to the secret
map of her life, the way in, the way out, the whole ranch.
Soon she was riding with the older kids
in cars I could not catch. Too fast and far ahead,
they would not be followed by me anymore.

In a few years I stepped off the porch myself
onto unfamiliar streets, out of this town and the next,
cobbled together my own grid of streets, stood at the outskirts
to find the plains are an open field without a road or sign.
And because the earth is round, all streets circle back
to this town decades later, past cemeteries
and emptied-out gas stations. Why are they thin
and pale and I am fat with the dew of the apple?
What do I know?

I have become tired of my speculating
on how we all arrived: Heather is wilted and dry
from years in a window. I try to tell the story
about Heather in the palm of it, all the roads
that followed Heather. Her schemes, her dreams,
the labyrinth of grass,
the labyrinth of cockamamie,
the labyrinth of unfortunate results.
And here nobody had the treasure.
Nobody found the buried key.
Nobody found the directions behind the directions.
If they had waited, looked me in the face and asked me,
could I have told them what I have found?

No, you can’t follow anymore around these streets,
the future is a myth and times a **** shame everywhere.

Do the dead who love us know?

hundred mediocre verses,
ten worthy poems,
one golden idea.

Let me tell you, I’m impressed with this blog.
Rarely is it so educational,
cumbersome and nicely sensational.
You’ve hit the nail on the head, you high dog!
I must say this issue is often a slog.
Not ample men find it inspirational
or like your links so navigational.
Your notion is good and I’m always agog.
If I give you advise for a tweaking,
perhaps it is what you already knew.
I search for things like what you are speaking,
intelligent views that equal my breakthrough:
If you have an old sink that is leaking,
click here and come visit the Hardware Zoo!

Profile of the Romans, statuesque, we gave her the Italian
Bianca, but from that failed into Bianca Bee, Binky Bee,
****** Pitty for that war injury when she was stationed
in neglect out in someone else’s yard. She keeps her nails
long, is soft as a humus dip, Mediterranean classical,
once a conqueror now gregarious, glamorous
like a female lion or demur when cornered
like movie stars before the war. Plump and voluptuous
like a tank who wants to snuggle and snore
wearing you like a wrap. She made us sure
with her love, inexhaustible
like a Western religion,
unabashed.

What I know
about the tops of swing sets,
paint peeling over rust spots,
the arc of the swoop,
all the land falling silent,
the curve of the earth.

It was a moment
before gravity coaxed us back
down and physics hurled us up again,
chest out and flying,
having joy, having fun,
singing “Seasons in the Sun”
over and over and over.
We surveyed the concrete tunnels,
the sun-bleached dirt expanse
of second grade off Juan Tabo.

Within the year
we’d moved to cities of grass
and we flew
under the shade of trees,
over two levels of soccer fields
and a forest beyond that,
tetherballs obsessively circling
over spots of asphalt.
The third-grade boys
were already chasing birds
but we chose to fly, fly, fly.
Everyday our feathers rent flying,
wind-riding, sailing off the seat
and landing in the soft dirt spot
worn into the Missouri grass.

One day
my bird friend Laura landed on the root
of a big oak tree, hands first.
She stood up, dusted off,
and walked with southern poise
to the nurse.
When she came back that afternoon
she was grounded
in a white wrist cast.

And the boys caught her after that.

Today we get trochees and pyrrhic feet
slacked like the clouds of New Mexico floating
high across the blue canopy of sky.
Today we get spondees vaulting like towers,
cumulous syllables dwarfing mountains,
a vast landscape full of metric vapor.

Hard mighty metal
plundering into the soil,
tunneling pastures
of calm, Sioux tracks on the cold
clay of thieves and History.

Pain.
It's tempting.
Hidden in hearts
That hold onto memories.
Addiction.

Healing.
It's reluctant.
The mind fails
But it always continues.
Affliction.

This is today, the air gray with juniper pollen slipping its way
into wobbly knees and brain matter, dragging into sludge
all the water that makes up a body princess.
If a poet could be a princess and if today she is stuck
on a bridge sneezing through a dragon’s discriminating riddles.

If all but two of the flowers are roses and all but two of the flowers are daisies and all but two of the flowers are tulips…

This epic fight our girl is far from up to, possibly unable to get
over, head off, stand ground against assaults
of logic and programming. And in the rock
towering up from the brook
the sword of intelligence,
the sword of beauty,
the sword of friendship,

how many flowers are there?

It’s all very exhausting picking one’s crucial flowers
and swords. But maybe,
with help from all the animal friends in the forest,
they could kick the knees of the dragon,
they could make the dragon feel less than with their goadings,
or they could convince the princess the choice to play with the beast
is just another riddle. Maybe together they could come up
with the answer 3.

Later, off the bridge and on the shore of the bank,
any shore, any bank (it doesn’t matter),
they will all happen upon the sword of words,
that balmy burn and wound healer,
and this will make the poet princess feel better, stronger
thrusting lies and testimony into the history of tomorrow.

Dead men walking do not know
how a ticking clock impersonates a metronome
endlessly blathering on about Michelangelo
until a buzzer shakes up a heart in Rome.

How a ticking clock impersonates a metronome,
tucking in pieces and smoothing out sheets,
until a buzzer shakes up the dogs of home,
biting down all the same bones the under-worm eats.

Tucking in pieces and smoothing out sheets,
the grubs of this world push out the loam,
biting down the same bones the under-worm eats.
The only walls of a whispering dome

where the grubs of this world pull out the loam
endlessly blathering on about Michelangelo.
The lonely halls where the whispering roam,
dead men walking do not know.

Home on a Wednesday composing a ballad,
Lonely for snark and simile,
Caught in a funk, not up to this challenge,
Wish I was 18 watching MTV.

Videos would come in a plethora of color,
Medicating me in the dark,
Big hair travelogues, a jungle of ruffles,
Frivolous pyrotechnic sparks.

A zombie, a nurse, a dance hall girl,
A star if you are what you watch,
A fishnet and lace princess in training
With no time for verbal hopscotch.

Eyes of a wolf, yellow and lineage of the forest,
Count Olaf eyebrows, white mischievous swoops,
he lays out like a swimming otter, kicks like a black bull.
He’s already six but we call him baby squatch,
Elvis, Franzipan, this arm-filling mouser,
connoisseur of fine earthy smells. He’s a heart leach;
let me be frank. He will stand on your chest
and look down into your lies. Life was so tough
on the streets of LA; he’s too proud to ask for much.
So you end up turning, inside and out, everything you have.

Today is the air I have in my lungs
after twenty-two days of meditation
with Deepak and Oprah online.

I percolate on the power
of Sanskrit and English,
if my mantra matters

in words at all.
Or if you get it where you get it;
and the meaningless of a line like—

sprigs move the shaft of a century’s beak
is not really postmodern, avant garde at all,
(derivation of “French and gay”).

But there is a point finally
and words do have meaning
contextually, to break us

and save us, très gay
flamboyant words,
theatrical and absurd words,

full of their sober enlightenments
before they get drunk
and leave us stranded at parties.

(NaPoWriMo Challenge: April 9, 2015)

The tendency to forget information that can be found readily online by using Internet search engines.


This information is the result of my searches on Google this morning:

• “Never memorize something that you can look up.” Online this quote is widely attributed to Albert Einstein.

• “[I do not] carry such information in my mind since it is readily available in books. ...The value of a college education is not the learning of many facts but the training of the mind to think.” This was Einstein in response to not knowing the speed of sound as included in the Edison Test. (Wikiquote)

• Many people wear the same clothes every day. In Einstein’s case this was a grey suit--the reason being that our thinking time is wasted making irrelevant wardrobe decisions. I also re-read the Henry David Thoreau quote about life being frittered away by detail. But when considering what is being frittered, you could add the mind, the spirit, time itself. This idea was part of Thoreau’s “simplicity, simplicity” quote which I once bought as a magnet from the museum at Walden Pond in the fall of 2001. I didn’t remember that date. I just googled a story about the trip, (www.apeculture.com/travel/boston.htm). In any case, I felt the magnet was being ironic. Like Einstein, President Barack Obama wears the same variation of two suits every day in order to “pare down decisions.” Apple genius Steve Jobs wore the same thing every day as does Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg. (Elite Daily: elitedaily.com/money/science-simplicity-successful-people-wear-thing-every-day/849141/)

• Google is creating personalities for androids, personalities that will live in the cloud and can be swapped into robots. I plan to forget this information because it’s creepy and like Ripley in the movie Alien, I’m suspicious of androids unless they are like Lance Henriksen in the movie Aliens in which case I would probably buy that personality for my robot if I had one.

• I also found out today that Google's images section, (which I use religiously when blogging), was created due to Jennifer Lopez’s green floral Versace dress, the one that opened like a surgical split to her navel, the one that caused such a kerfuffle when she wore it to the 2000 Grammy Awards and everyone searched Google fruitlessly for it afterwards. I’ve forgotten about that dress because I hated it. It looked like a Miami house-robe for one thing and I don’t like any couture that structurally hangs off *****.

• Google also announced a new patent today for a warning system that protects you from pop culture spoilers on Internet pages. If you think about it, this warning system will protect you from Google itself. Sometimes a little information ruins everything.

• I found all of this Google news on Google News.

• You can find more Einstein quotes here:  brightdrops.com/albert-einstein-quotes, one particular quote informs me that creativity is knowing how to hide your sources.

• D’oh!

• Which is a word I have always remembered because the great poet Homer said it.

Many days,
Poetry will not coax me out of my stupor
with the zest of a child
on the first day of summer.
Many days,
she will not make a sound
as she runs through a house
made of my words - no anklet tinkling against silvery feet,
no soft swishes of her dupatta across the sofa.
Many days,
Poetry would like to leave me alone
- in my home of rust and rubble,
in the middle of technicolour trouble,
me surrounded by blunt edges
of half-chipped words,
half-baked rhythm (never rhyme), half-sighed syllables onto blank paper.
Many days,
Poetry sees me accept complete defeat,
with art gathering dust
in the pages of notebooks that will never need filling,
with pens that will never be picked up, with ideas that will never be strung into a poem.

And yet here I am.

Picking up frayed string ends,
trying to tie them into a verse,
to leave it on the first shelf for her
to hopefully pick up.

It might be time for Poetry
to take 29 slowstumblingstuttering steps towards me,
this is me taking the first.

for Merle Stevens Wehmhoff*


It’s always a summertime cruise
and we’re sweatin’ on the deck,
leaning back on white chairs
and telling tall tales.
A hot river breeze is floating by
with a cool shade clinging
loose to the banks.
We’re drinking ice teas with lemons
like were Kings of that place.
We’re high rollers and barking
like we own the place.
We sail by the entire world
rolling down that river,
our big wheel turning up and up
the wake’s white froth.
At twilight we‘re dancing
and leaning over the edges
as the lights came up
all along the boat.
Isn’t it always this way:
before the end someone
takes a mind to duck out early,
always the life of the party,
always in a coattails and a big hat.
They’ll tip their brims and give you a wink
as they step off the south side ramp,
twirling canes and umbrellas,
depending upon the rain.
The party crowd always tries
to lure them back
but it’s never any use.
And the last you see them
they’re sauntering up the hill
and then they hit that crest
without even so much as a wave
or a shout of *see you soon.
The boat slows down
to kind of a melancholy float,
everyone looking back
but they’re already gone.

Every puzzle takes a first step
figurin’ and measurin’—
cutting the extemporaneous—
getting the lay of the land
on the crime scene, on the body—
detailing and matching lineups—
following every lead
and kicking it in
with bluffing intimidation—
drawing probabilities—
untangling the material
to fit, unstitching the profile
to back out mistakes—
the sweat of thought.
Putting it together
and tearing it apart.
The tyranny and the value
of the word on the street—
crimes of fashion
designs on ******—
what is revealed
if you’re not careful—
you can mesh anything together.
Self-composure
as your story stands
or falls.
Time always running out
before the job is done
and after the job is done—
the bitter faces around the gallows
as the execution hangs.

There's few spaces
in this world where
a sea of faces
doesn't scare me.
There's fewer spaces
in this world where
the faces turn up
to me and smile -
real, actual smiles -
and not the fake ones for shady profiles.

I love you guys.

I see Open Eyes -
filled with a thirst
to know more,
see more,
be more,
be better than before.
Eyes that do not blink
at the introduction of something new, views that don't flinch
when given something
to think about.

I see Open minds -
welcoming the creation
of a brand-new world,
one where art doesn't
have to shuffle along the sidelines
of a room,
where society can leave
 its guidelines at the door.
 I'm sure that we here,
today,
are the first to realize
that art creates a life
beyond the arbitrary
beating of hearts.

We're children
 of the first thinking generation,
 catching on to swinging anchors
from sinking ships
 to swim up and
 breathe in the first gulps of art.

Today is depleted,
washed up and resigned.
Even the dogs have given up
and gone in. The candle stubs
cannot be lit. The backyard door
is stuck, the grass is dying in the sun.
And as the ghost chokes the old battery¸
the toy soldier lies broken on his side twisting
like a ****, kicking his last futile leg up into the air.

As suitors go, I’m sturdy and fun, fresh faced, considerate and neat.
I’m socially literate and wear all the best shoes on my feet.

I’m looking for love and a little adventure,
a fun-loving confidante who wont over-censure.

But my dates with you have been obscenely pristine:
dancing and golfing and luncheons on Eggs Florentine,

argued law with your Father while drinking dark coffee,
and swapped coleslaw recipes with your maid in the lobby.

You’re smart and you're keen and your sleuthing is swell.
You keep only good company, sending delinquents to jail.

You’re modestly perfect in all that you do.
But I like a girl with more Hullabaloo.

And I regret to be the one who must give you this news,
but George, Bess and I are all dumping you.

There's something about
opening a bottle of colour -
knowing
that any way it spills
won't spell A-R-T at your hands.
let's call it the audacity of trying,
and
move on.

Same thing for a lump of clay -
lying in front of you,
waiting for creative violence,
but you know that your thoughts
don't have fingers,
your ideas don't have arms.
let's call it the pointlessness of wishing
and
move on.

Don't look at the camera -
the eager buttons waiting,
glinting in the hope of your touch
a lens waiting to be turned -
knowing that your eye can never
translate your sight into art,
your vision will never equal
an image.
let's call it the imperfection of waiting,
and
move on.

My last hope is a pen.
my fingers rush over it,
finding solace in known grooves
where my fingers have settled
time and again.
i call it the comfort of a story.

and this time,
*i stay

To tell you the truth about travel, I hate it.
Someone once told me
that travel is a compromise
for teleportation.
Everything
is basically a compromise
until higher tech arrives.
To tell you the truth about travel,
I really don't want to.
I want to let you hold my image
against long winding roads,
against the sad shrubbery
by the side of the highway,
and believe
that I'll be happy
when I'm not at home.
My loud voice and excited manner
may even trick into believing
that I adore the hustle bustle of a new place,
new people,
     new traffic,
           new smells,
                sights,
                      sounds.
But to tell you the truth, I really hate travelling.

Save me from suffering the pains
of packing a bag
with the most essential items
designed to make you look like
a Prudent Traveller™ - I want to carry
only my fatigue
and annoyance
at being asked to move out.
(Some Hajmola, perhaps - the green and purple flavours)

I am not seduced by lines on a map
telling me where to go,
and how to get there,
I swear.

I would rather have
someone trace the edges
of imaginary continents
across my mind
by virtue of their words.

Cartographers aren't redundant to the world,
perhaps - but have you ever had
a laid back holiday with
only
*i n t e r m i t t e n t naps?