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Poetry……I’m
I’m
I’m a Galleria Mall in a National Park,
a French film noir in a grocery store,
art school in the kitchen,
An erotica book on a Wednesday noon,
And a heated debate at 2 a.m.
I’m the cookie baker
trouble maker
heart breaker
claim staker-
I want everything to change
While the good parts stay the same.
I want the freedom of the road
while harvesting the flowers I’ve sowed.
I want a home that feels like love
and all the laughter it’s made of-
I want a soundtrack worth a movie
And then I want to leave behind
A mountain of creations
For my progeny to find.
That’s all.
Poetry Day- America: The Long Dream
So, this poem arrived in a dream, intact, and I grabbed a piece of paper and wrote it down, just like this. There’s music too, but since I can’t write music, its just in my head. I wrote this in 1998 but I think about it every 9/11.
America: The Long Dream
America,
as we awaken from this long dream
we look around to see what’s happening
and wipe the sleep out of our weary eyes.
Long ago,
we came from every nation on the earth
our skin is shaded like the mother lands
our eyes reflect the places of our birth.
We’ve lived for years a nation under God
but never dared to say which one that was
now deep from sleep a restless voice is heard.
Until we see,
we came together here to start anew
and find the likenesses in me and you
we’ll never reach the point where love is true.
The purpose of our lives has always been
to learn to love regardless of our skin
The God we call out to is all the same.
The only difference is the man made name.
We bow our heads and ask
direction for
our lives again.
And in the middle of the darkest night
we hear the whispered voice and see the light
that fills our hearts and somehow makes it right.
This is the dawning of a brand new day.
Our turmoil leads us to another way-
to handle change with grace.
America,
as we awaken from this long dream
and look around to see what’s happeneing
we see the truth within our open eyes.
We’re standing truly at each other’s side.
Our learning hearts are finally open wide
to let the new day in.
Buying dirty books
The last thing you expect when you go to Old Orchard Beach in Maine on the long Labour Day weekend is to keep your sanity. The second-last thing you expect, among the tourists, souvenir shops, fried-everything stands and carnival rides, is a book store. But there it is, right on the strip. Granted, it’s full of remaindered books, and you have to dodge the caricaturist parked at the entrance, but it’s a little bit of paradise among the bikinis. Incidentally, if you’re looking for something called Paradise Among the Bikinis, you’re in the wrong kind of store.
But I did find a dirty book. Tucked into the row of fiction was a book by one of my favourite authors, Nicholson Baker. His novel, The Mezzanine, is particularly good. It’s set entirely during a ride up an escalator. Baker writes a type of fiction in which not much physical action…
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What I’ve Seen…Reaching 60
Tomorrow is my birthday. It’s a big one. Sixty. At this auspicious moment I am wondering how the hell did this many years pass so ridiculously fast?
When my kids were young teens itching to do something they weren’t ready for yet, I would get out the construction tape measure. I would lay it out to 100 inches and chalk where their ages fell and how long their wait really was to participate in the activity that eluded them. Then I would point down the line to how many more times they could do that forbidden thing in the one hundred or so years they had to live their lives. It made the two inches from 14 to 16, when their driver’s license would come seem like the paltry eye blink that it was.
Looking back down my own line of numbers, already passed, I am embracing my million moments that drew together to make me. Gathered knowledge is just hoarding thoughts until you share it. For what it’s worth, these are some of the things I have seen.
Even if you grew up watching shows like Friends and assuming adulthood would be a constant coffee klatch with your across the hall neighbors, you will spend most of your time alone in this life. Unless you are conjoined, this is the way of the world. And if you can’t be at peace in your times of solitude, why in the hell would you think other people would be interested in spending time with you either? Learn shit. Get interested and then you will be interesting-to yourself and to others.
The greatest lesson for young teen abstinence should be the fact that the first person you get naked with will-in all likelihood-not be the last. With the exception of the four couples you will meet who are childhood sweethearts-you will swim into and out of tubs, ponds, raging rivers and oceans of love in all its forms until you find somewhere that becomes your place in the world. That’s where you will build your home- however early or late in life you find it and trying to pitch a tent anywhere else will give temporary shelter and nothing more.
When people close to you lash out it is usually because they want you to love them more than it appears you do. If you pay attention, people will tell you what they want-so listen.
Most people, even the most hardened among us, still have a soft, gooey center and if you are paying attention and listening you can figure out what they love. That is what made them gooey like that in the first place. If they showed you the gooey love, they shared the keys to their castle. Honor that.
There are seven billion people on this planet. When you are not famous, the statistical magic of finding one person who can see you for the blazing light you actually are is a gift rarer then the most expensive gemstone. Own that.
Real love never dies. It only changes shape to accommodate the way you live now.
The secret to happiness is this: figure out what you want and find a way to ask for it.
Love is your own personal experience. It sparks and blooms inside your own head-like a private revelation; a movie only you can see. Even if the object of your affection does not return your ardor with the same intensity or at all, never hold regret for having felt that feeling. To know what love feels like is like visiting the most beautiful place on Earth. Not everyone will go there in their lifetime but you have, and you can tell others what it feels like to stand in the center of all that beauty; what it is to see the blazing light of someone else and have it warm your soul even if it’s just for a moment. It will change you forever; no matter if life or death moves you far away from that other person, it will remain part of who you are now.
What I have seen while I have run, swam, played, danced, loved, fought, created, walked, crawled, bled, cried and laughed my way through the sixty years on planet Earth comes down to this: love. It always comes down to that. And on the last day I get in this life, it will still be about love; who I loved and who loved me.
That is where I have a cave of treasure like Aladdin. I remember all the love my heart has felt. It fills my pens, my brushes, my cooking pots and the large broken parts inside of me. It is my gold.
The Japanese have a practice called Kintsugi. It’s a ceramic pottery ritual where a beloved broken vessel is pieced back together with molten gold used like glue. It gathers the shattered parts together; making it whole again in a new and beautiful way.
Today, I will visualize all the love I’ve known as gold and let it fill the cracks and broken parts of me to make me whole like the day I was born only different…better. It will be my private gift to myself; the strengthening of my weak places. What I’ve seen in my sixty years has been a kaleidoscope of wonder and I am filled with anticipation as the curtain rises on the next act.
Poetry Day: Word Rescue
Word Rescue
I’ll fling my words to you
like fragrant flowers at your feet
your head down again
you might
notice them-
Words like silver death stars to your heart
thrown on still night air
over soft linen
to kill your drowning doubt-
adamantine chain of words
fashioned
down –
to your hand
an escape route
from your perfect oubliette
that you have made
your lonesome home
Water Lilies ~
I adore these flowers. More for the fact that they fight their way up through mud and darkness to reach for sun. Even more that their roots are an interconnected world we do not see. As we all are…as we all should be.
“It took me time to understand my waterlilies. I had planted them for the pleasure of it;
I grew them without ever thinking of painting them. ” – Claude Monet.
Poetry Day: Cactus Flower
Cactus Flower
Creamy cactus flower
bouquet out of reach
guarded earnestly
there will be no souvenirs
lucid dreaming carries me
off to somewhere else
til I’m half a step removed
a movie out of sync
as what I was and who I am
come close to touching hands
for just one golden moment
time slows in its dance
and then once again
I am standing in that desert
looking at a chance
that the world ahead
held a certain sign
your heart beating next to mine
for a breath or two
it was me and you
then time rushed ahead
regained its bruising pace
in this dreaming place
and I was looking at your face
the same yet different now
silvered round the brow
though eyes will never change
a lifetime passed between
what you meant to me
and who you are to someone else
but for just one golden moment
time slowed in its dance
until what I was and who I am
were almost touching hands –
they left a blossom on my palm
an offering from my past
a single creamy flower
plucked from a cactus tower
message clear and plain-
an exchange for all my rain
The Right Word
Mark Twain famously once said “the difference between the right word and the almost right word is really a large matter – it is the difference between the lightning and the lightning bug.”
As writers it’s important to know that we’re more than storytellers, we are wordsmiths! Every word we type has potential to do more than convey character and plot. Our words can also deepen the mood and emotional resonance in our novels.
Ilsa J. Bick is a master of this technique. In her apocalyptic zombie novel, Ashes, Bick intensifies each page with the danger of her world through the use of aggressive words. In the following examples Bick uses the violent words of: slash, spear, and pierced, to describe otherwise peaceful images.
“She registered the slash of morning sun in an already too-bright and very cold room…” (301).
“She heard the creak of Tom’s footsteps overhead, and a
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Word Ninja Girl 