Magpie 104: To Be

She finds it exasperating

she has the duty

to be—

the plastic clown

the elastic  cheerleader

the Wal-Mart greeter

picking up the slack

the life coach

the mom

the wife

spiritual guru

on the scrapheap of life

Michael A. Wells

Magpie Tales 104

Finally Friday

It's finally Friday. Yeah!

A bit of an oddity to report - I went nearly two weeks without a Diet Coke but alas I had one last night. That's a really long time for me to abstain. It is a legitimate food group in my book.

Lot of ups and downs this week, and there is nothing metaphorical about that comment. Some grueling work days and some good stuff too. There was Valenine's Day.  That evening - well, after midnight our time we got a call from our youngest daughter Meghan. To set the stage you need to realize that clear back to her high school days Meghan would always stop if she reallized it was 11:11  be it AM or PM and say, "11:11 Make a Wish."   So a 11:11PM (her time) she is awaken by Brandon who tells her it's 11:11 and to make a wish.  (I picture her as perhaps a we bit foggy as she is waking up...  anyway, I'm sure her eyes popped wide open as he presented her with an engagement ring. How freek'n romantic is that! The guy has class.

I'm reading tonight at an open mic. I have no read in a while. I used to read publicly fairly frequently but not so much these days. Having been under the weather off and on these past three months - at times with incessent coughing, I'm a little nervous about tonight.  I've been beter these past few days but even yesterday as I was ingagued in a lenthly meeting with a cliant my throat became a little horse and I was fighting back coughing sperts.

A mail bag note for the week:  On Wednesday I received a cool Valentine from Kelli Agodon...  The poet Pablo Neruda on the front... it was a cool picture and of course what poet would better represent the best of Valentine's day. Thank you Kell!

That's it for this morning... wish me good luck tonight!

Friday Night Open Mic Locally

Feb 17h -  Reading at

CROSSROADS COFFEE HOUSE 

OPEN MIC  7PM
                  310 Southwest Blvd. K.C., MO 64108

Confession Tuesday - Valentine Edition

Dear Reader:

It's been a week since my last confession. Actually 6 days if I'm going to be totally honest.

It's Valentine’s Day and I stayed especially busy at work. Shouldn't Valentine’s Day be a holiday? A paid day off? Of course it should... I know you must agree.

My wife and I did not do cards today. She has really become kind of negative on buying cards. I gave serious thought to writing a special poem for the occasion but my work on it the past week did not impress me and I could not expect it to be received by her any better so I scraped my various drafts. I will work on it again in the future when I am less pressured by time.

I confess that it was while on the way to work this morning and bummed out that I had not satisfied my original plan that another thought came to my mind. I dropped my wife off at her office and proceeded to my own. That was during the 7am hour. I decided to text my wife with a short note as to something I loved about her. And then sometime each of the next hours until 5pm I repeated another text with another love proclamation of some type. Several hours into the day I received a text saying, "you're too sweet."

I confess that a couple of the texts she found amusing. There was some light heartedness - it was not all serious stuff. Not bad for a Capricorn huh?

Magpie 103: The Surgeons Hands

The Surgeons Hands

reaching skyward the chiseled hands

cupped as a vessel

yet extended in exaltation

extended  fingers—   precision tools

against the distress of body

against the anguish of passing

fingers that move the veins of life about

that spread open incisions— explore - extract

supplicate the God of mercy

for the generosity of more time

more life

a precious organ

the hand offers

dear God

make this body whole

again

Michael A. Wells

Magpie 103

Like that Chrysler Super Bowl ad with Clint Eastwood? Thank a poet

Of the three people credited as copywriters on the powerful Chrysler advertisement, the one featuring Clint Eastwood that aired for the first time during Sunday's Super Bowl, one is poet Matthew Dickman.

[Story]

Trying to catch up on some reading...

Perhaps you've missed one or more of these items:

Nobel winner left behind new poems ~  A new book of poems by Nobel Prize winner Wislawa Szymborska, who died at the age of 88, will be published in 2012.

Texting As Poetry? Rubbish, Says Oxford Professor ~ "Texting is like the old ticker tape: highly dramatic and intense if it's reporting the Wall Street Crash or the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour, not through any inherent virtue of the machine. Is the breaking news which runs at the foot of the screen on the BBC news channel condensed and consequently poetic? I fail to see how anyone could rationally claim that it is. Again texting is linear only. Poetry is lines in depth designed to be seen in relation or in deliberate disrelation to lines above and below."

Taking A Second Look At Gertrude Stein - And Finding A Lot To Like ~ "Not every 'genius' is equally suffocated by the label. Readers know the extraordinary reputations of Shakespeare and Virginia Woolf, but some prefer 'Richard III' to 'Richard II,' or 'Mrs. Dalloway' to 'Orlando.' They feel at liberty to discriminate. Fewer readers imagine they can create their own Stein; many feel she is beyond their capacity to understand." The