Workspaces...

A worthwhile slide show called Workspaces: Donald Hall - - A Slide Show can been seen here. Thanks to Cindy for the link.

Couple of other items....

Thanks to those who have responded to the rewrite / revision survey in the side bar. It's still open so please respond if you haven't.

I still have a few of my broadsides, Give Me Some Everyday Religion a poem of my own with an Anne Sexton epigram on it. If you'd like one. just e-mail me with your address.

The Rug

Horizontal stripes thrown down
Bar the floor from leaving.
We watch all day
It never moves from prison.

You and I are visitors
Neither saying much
And the floor isn't talking.

Perhaps it has spoken things to others,
Later used against it.
Dirty truths that were never intended
Beyond its horizontal plane.

Child Soldiers [draft)

A slumping night
Wept for those pressed into duty battle
By grown men with archaic presence of mind
To plunder the natural order- peace-

It is all remedial arithmetic.
More soldiers equals more tokens in their hands.
More chips they can gamble away
With low maintenance child warriors.

No enlistment paperwork or die-cast metal tags
To string around their necks.
No toe tags for the dead.

No one knows where they come from
Or cares where they go;
No duty to notify families or messy emotions.
Just a simple war-
With child labor.

I'm In Poor Mojo's Almanic(k) Issue # 342

One of my poems accepted earlier this year is finally up at Poor Mojo's Almanic(k).

The direct link Beautiful Music.

A Monday Medley

This is the start of a grueling week of getting things in order to be out of the office for a week. So much to do, so few nerves left to stretch.

A few bits from my journal this last week:

• a pretentious line from a love song / neither recalls the tune
• tracing a smile with his finger / her red lips kiss his index
• the days are ruled / by tweezer fingers /picking here, picking there
• crystal frost clinging to the bony flesh /of the best face one could put forward / under blistery circumstances
• a mind is a terrible thing to use when it's fucked up
• no one's here but scamper feet / who've come to witness my headache- / a mind with anxious classical thoughts / the Greek gods eavesdrop through paper walls

~0~

755
for Bud

You there when history was made
I saw you in high def
You didn’t want to be there
Your face said as much
Your looked so uncomfortable in your skin

Later you talked on your cell
I wonder who it was
There was no excitement in your face
I was excited for him
You should have stayed home

The Breakdown ofThinking (Draft)

The Breakdown of Thinking (draft)

A once pristine constellation of small gauge wired pathways,
Moved data about with intrepid speed.

This territory later would clog down and misplace
Important bits of knowledge lost in the cobwebs that stretched
Tilted in corners of the shell of an aging command central.

If older is wiser, it is also part of a strange pathos;
More is less, expanse is limited, there is always a but—
These come with a price that never seems to be negotiable.

Sunday... I believe it is too early

Sunday morning and my mind is largely in sleep mode. I did notice something worth checking out over at Jilly's: The Reanimation of Ted Williams' Frozen Head.

Then I noted that Kelli responded to the NPR series "This I Believe" and her response can be read here. Thinking about this reminds me, I did one many moons ago, and decided to see if in fact that mine made it past the circular file. To my surprise, it did, and can be found here.

I've had breakfast and need to find what I did with my medicine but thinking about where I last had it is like doing mental calisthenics and it is too early for that. Ouch!

Journal Bits From The Past Week

Taken from my journal this week:

• Holder of first and last impressions
• A translucent additive to the tributaries / winding through the body
• fed on surplus desires / hand fulls of daffodils /knuckles white with clinch
• story lines so well rehearsed / blocked out in homes and on street /corners that Thornton Wilder / might have mistaken
• Life eases along here. Not saying it / is an easy life, just that resistance / has become the motor oil overdue for a change

Kraft Macaroni & Cheese

Went to my mailbox yesterday and much to my astonishment found a stamped piece of a Kraft Macaroni & Cheese box cut the size of a postcard. On the flip side a note about one of my poems that appeared in the Grist - 2007 ( State Poetry Society Anthology).

It was of course a pleasant surprise. The writer acknowledged liking my poem titled "Sport Utility Poem"* for "pzzzazzz and sasss-"

I found the writer's approach using recycled box both enterprising and heartening. It had to have passed through a couple of other hands in order to reach me and that gave her a way to make a statement by example. The writer was a poet peer and she expressed herself in verse with an Ode To Michael Poet.

While this was not a situation where a poem had a life affirming impact on another it was none the less the kind of acknowledgement of an others work I blogged about a few days back that I noted as rare. It is I suppose, one more reason this box of Kraft Macaroni & Cheese was especially tasty.

* this poem first appeared in the Rockhurst Annual Arts Review in 2006

So Many Questions (draft)

Gravity driven cracks of despair
Map the years of his face
And give character
Where otherwise none exists.

Reading him offers more questions than answers—
Like why has he so little to say
Verbal or otherwise?

If time has been kind to him
It would be subjectively debated.
Perhaps he was not meant to live this long—
Or he could be far younger than imaginable.

He seems so alone. Why is he alone? Is he really
Alone— was there ever someone in his life
That smoothed out the cracks
That ask so many questions.

An Oral History Not Withstanding (draft)

Counting stops
Momentarily—

Across the acres of indifference
To a score no one cared to keep

And narration will not reveal
A winner as such
And maybe that an event was
Ever held

Will be in doubt,
As the birth of a sparrow
Claiming nothing to its credit
Passes without notice.

Our Ancestor's Curse [draft]

Our ancestry placed us in chains
Shackling our imagination to a sinister cellar
Amid the pickling jars and moonshine
Stashed for future need

It is no wonder that our thoughts are always turned inward
And we do not see well beyond the darkness of our desperation
Souls entombed in black and surrounded by things preserved

They are dead to the present
But it is believed their usefulness
Is sometime in the distant future

What are we here for anyway—
We cannot possibly see beyond our means
Past the dead cucumbers of harvest
So many summers ago

Minimalist

Overwhelming Loss

Torn from a page of grief
Overcome with tears
Words like sponges soaked
Into the margins of a life
Shackled to a story
Whose end is overlapped
With alternating
Twisted gray jabs
And flattened blunt trauma
To a child like psyche

a draft

Scraper

Breaking ground in forced exposition
Hoisting aloft the engine of ingenuity
Panels fastidiously fastened to iron girders
Reflecting upon a day stars dream

Of colossal architectural spawning
From the mind’s envelope pushed past all others
Higher vision touching nothing but the wide open
Thinness of molecular indifference to volume

From my Journal - 5-22

(Time) A sort of invisible ink
Of the present- seen only
In light of the past

Restrained

The fantasy of grape stained rage
Died in the transistor radio
While playing the oldies

One more time than he cared
To snap his fingers or necks
Of chicken like

His hard mannered grandma
Would do behind
The raspy gray tool shed

I Am

Back from a Writers Workshop
What did I buy – you ask
In a random sort of way
As if maybe you care and maybe not

I bought myself back from linoleum
And I am now vertical
The food was –
Well it was

But the sun hid for while
And time was what it always is
Approximation of something taught to us
But what if it isn’t at all

What if the war were to eclipse time
Would it matter if one fell face down dead in the dirt
Or if 32 hundred and change came home boxed in memory
To families that could not reset their watches and make it go away

Words coagulate to prove
The math backwards
And if I write – I am

They're Here

My Poetry Month Broadsides have arrived.
100 of them are available while they last. If you would like one, email me with your name and address. Each one is numbered and signed.
The poem is one I wrote some time back titled, Give Me Some Everyday Religion and it has an epigraph from Anne Sexton.

NaPoWriMo first draft

At Last

“How did someone come at last to the word for patience
And know that it was the right word for patience”
~ W.S. Merwin

No subtle breach of taxation
Deliberation that grew moss up the north side
Persistence before we knew what

It isn’t without end though it may seem
At last it would be in short supply
At some point we all find ourselves

Hanging by that last red nerve
When you reach that point
You just know



* note:

I had intended to post all of my poems for NaPoWriMo on a separate blog linked here but have decided not to. Anything written and posted the dame day is likely a best a draft. Some of these may very well have promise and some not. Clearly it is unlikely any would become a full fledged poem in a single day. It has happened to me but it is rare.

I am posting these on a forum, but otherwise, I'll perhaps give you one every few days or some bits like I do from my journal. That seems to me to be the best course for me to take. As always, your comments are welcome...

Geometry

Brave topography heaved heavenward
With each refreshing breath
And I could not but help notice
Though it was not as if I set out to
But more as one might stare
In contemplation of a creation
Of Henry Moore if you were to find it
Stark naked in the middle of your backyard
One morning when you let the dog out.

It has occurred to me that God
Like a sculptor must have envisioned
Such appreciation of the simplicity
Of smooth curve lines that intersect
Man’s eye and pull him along
The contouring waves to become himself
A partner to this masterpiece
In the same way a poet makes the reader
A part of his every poem.