oh the things you’ll learn on the interwebs

I’ve learned so many things lately: Grumpy Cat is real. Ice balls have formed on the shore of Lake Michigan. Sharon Jones has cancer.

Let’s call it Fucking Around Friday and leave it at that.

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Protected: poem

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new poem

I can’t remember the last time I wrote a poem.

I’ve been working on a couple of manuscript submissions among a few other things. I suspect once I’m back home and done with my deadline, I’ll write again.

Without further ado….

All You Can Eat

The city’s grime on my hands,
my feet

I hike my leg into the sink
watch the dark water
rinse down the drain

no homeless
no bikes
no traffic
just me
and my feet

I wonder how long
before I am obese

like the man picking a quarter cup of coffee
out of the garbage

all I can eat
every day
I’ll go
and stay
for 2 hours
4 kheers after 3 servings of chicken tikka

I’ve eaten enough
now straight to the source
I’ll fill the bowl
with rice pudding and rose petals
and soak

no more food

time to starve

time

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Poetry Jam XVII

Blue Skies Above, Low Tide Below

Gulls squabble in the shallows
where the fishing is best

I lie down in the low-tide waves,
stroke the sand

my arms sweep
like I am rowing in a shell
but I am not going anywhere today

the soft sand begins to feel dry
in my underwater hands

piping plovers
move one-mindedly
like ants or flocking blackbirds

I stand and look at the horizon
upside-down between my legs
the waves almost touching my face

can I orient to this strange world
where the sky flattens
and color disappears?

I lie back down on dry sand
cold on my bare back
and whisper your name to the blue above

I called and you came
my love

I called and you came

October 9, 2011

This week’s Poetry Jam directed us to write a love poem (I “missed” last week’s Poetry Jam, ie, couldn’t write an apt poem to save my life even though the prompt was a juicy one). Just something light and airy today, gott sei dank!

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Easter Post: Beautiful Words by Norman Maclean

These aren’t particularly Easter-ly words and the passage takes place in summer, not spring. It is however, timeless, and I can’t find much meaning in the holiday that we call Easter, so this is what I have come to today.

I come back to this passage again and again. It is beautiful and contains so much about life and death and work and rhythm and love and being human. I still haven’t gotten to the point of understanding it fully, but I am trying to remain teachable in my heart and soul and being.

Excerpt from “A River Runs Through It.” Norman Maclean; The University of Chicago Press; Chicago; 1976, p. 104

Now nearly all those I loved and did not understand when I was young are dead, but I still reach out to them.

Of course, now I am too old to be much of a fisherman, and now of course I usually fish the big waters alone, although some friends think I shouldn’t. Like many fly fishermen in western Montana where the summer days are almost Arctic in length, I often do not start fishing until the cool of the evening. Then in the Arctic half-light of the canyon, all existence fades to a being with my soul and memories and the sounds of the Big Blackfoot River and a four-count rhythm and the hope that a fish will rise.

Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it. The river was cut by the world’s great flood and runs over rocks from the basement of time. On some of the rocks are timeless raindrops. Under the rocks are the words, and some of the words are theirs.

I am haunted by waters.

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