simple things

a couple of beers

handful of salty chips

clips of some really bad movies on youtube

& a few lines of poetry

are just enough

maybe

it's the sunday nite after the holidays & you wanna hear an exquisite song about never losing your dream(s) sung by a man who has, i think, one of the most perfect voices in contemporary pop music, as the world goes fucking crazy, again, this is a beautiful performance

i love a rainy night

the picture on the mantle is crooked

stars align -- so it is said

we are made of stardust

& we shall return to dust

so it is said

give me the heartbreak of the world

which bears too much on the heart

as we slide into another turn around the sun

happy new year!!!

it's a few minutes to midnight here in Sac.  i can hear fireworks already even tho it is a rainy night.  one more turn around the sun.  & a new one just starting.  like the speaker in the thom gunn poem below says, 'i am not superstitious'.  i'm not either but i will take care to not step on cracks that will break my momma's back!  i don't do resolutions either.  well, perhaps, maybe, i shall endeavor to drink more, eat more, & maybe take up smoking!  

however the new year turns out we are, yes we, all of us, are in it together.  so to that i raise my beer to us all & say HAPPY NEW YEAR!  & also MAKE IT COUNT!

CHEERS!

flourish

i read, i think, it has been many many years ago, in the journals of george plimpton, the word flourish.  according to plimpton flourish was victorian slang for having a quickie, such as the lord of the manor might write in his journal, 'flossie & i had a flourish on the settee this afternoon.'  

mighty fine diction!  but i have yet to find any dictionary to support plimpton's claim that flourish was slang for fast, loose, & happy sex.  a quick search on the interwebs tells me that flourish was victorian shorthand for a showy, flashy, ostentatious display of manners & style.  

gotta trust the sources, right.  i dunno.  i think flourish for a quickie is a subtle & elegant word for sex.  why not.  english is not short on slang words for doing the deed.  be they be seemingly innocuous or downright gutter talk.  even so poetry is made from such language.    

xmas on the run

 

ugh!!!

i lost a poem, last night.  just as i dotted it with a final i.  i was using the old copy & paste into a google doc when i wrote the last line.  but somehow, i dunno how, cuz perhaps i maybe l'idiot, i deleted it.  since i primarily write using either my phone &/or my laptop & post many poems here on this blog, which i was attempting last night, poof! it was gone!  

dagbladit!  

i wrote it fast.  trying to stay within the self-imposed limits of a time schedule.  after the initial cussing & gnashing of teeth i thought fuck it all the way to hell.  the poem is no worse for it being lost.  i remember a few lines so perhaps i'll try again.  but at the moment, grrrrrr!!!

for i really believe, & try to live by, poetry is not a career.  it is not a job.  it is a thing i do in my life.  a way of life.  poetry abides by life & life abides by poetry.  if you adjust yourself according to its mad diktats for poetry does possess enormous power.  & it can be a capricious art.  

& but still it is an art, an ancient one at that, as old as human beings have taken a breath & expressed their wonder, anger, desires, titillations, appetites, pieties, stupidities etc etc. into song, into words, into language.  it is, at least for this old punk & suburban NorCal boy it is the best thing, other than being a father & husband, in the very short years i have had to live on this small ball of a beautiful blue planet.  

cuz sometimes i feel like caedmon when i look into the night sky & see, right now, jupiter.  when i open the night sky app on my phone - oh man! - & see we have mapped the stars & planets in our solar system, we track space debris & our own satellites.  & i want to sing as loud & as far as my breath can go.

there will be more poems as long as i have breath left.  i lost one.  i am still pissed at myself for losing it.  hell, i'll chalk it up to my own kind of antipoetry.  a kind of writing that doesn't get written!  i'm good at not writing too!  

quote unquote

I am searching out for the ecstatic life

with flyswatter and wineglass in hand.

--jim harrison [weeping]