Tag Archives: writing

In praise of

Lovesome words, Writing, ,

Porcelain_commode_lid_(3445553034)

In praise of

The prepositional variety

Of those that screw on, pop off,

Seal up, keep in

And shut out

Snappy_Tom_promotional_lid

As well as those that

Require tools to remove

Whether bendable or breakable

Hinged or unhinged

Hard as roofs for the dead

Soft as tents for pies

Sturdy as helmets for pots

Or merely heaps of pot

Coffin_Aufbewahrungshalle_Westfriedhof_Muenchen

Atop the heads of rich and poor –

Who need to be warm

Or want to be cool

Baseball_cap

Mighty eye shutters

Doors to dreams both night and day

Locking you inside nightmares

Opening up to set you free

Blink and wink makers

Whipping your forty lashes or more

1024px-Eye_makeup

Pandora’s temptation

Flipping open angry and crazy

Keepers of secrets

Stoppers of talk

St_Swithin's_church_-_the_old_parish_chest_-_geograph.org.uk_-_893557

Everywhere you look or don’t

Lids, lids, lids

In praise of

1024px-Decorative_Tin_Lid

Photos:   Commode lid     Orange lid      White coffin    Eye     Hinged chest    Decorative Lid

 

Winter’s night

Seriously..., Writing, , ,

DSC_2929 - Version 2

 

The shadows have been there all day, waiting for the light to slant. The world turns its back on the sun as the shadows tilt onto the ceiling above the kitchen lights.

 

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Twilight awakens my longing, lets it loose like a hungry hound, searching for a bone I buried somewhere long ago. I miss the ones who have left. I hunt for them along the trail of memories,  following a familiar path that leads to the river. Here as always, I lose their scent.

 

Evening washes the room gray. My eyes cannot adjust; details fade like memories. Darkness brings its own weariness. I wear it like a cloak or shroud. I am too tired to go further. I long to hibernate, to crawl inside the barren night, and sleep and sleep and sleep.

 

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I listen to the lullaby of dark; I am weary, friend.

Don’t stop.

But I must sleep away this night that seems to never end. My tears will drown me if I do not stop.

Don’t close your eyes.

Why? Just a bit of rest and I will start again.

There is no starting after that sleep.

How far until the light?

The weight of snow

Seriously..., Writing, , , ,

Snow laden pine

 

 

Today the snow fell.

 

 

The pine trees stood in the silence to catch the falling sky. Two crows watched, unaware or unconcerned. The pines had nowhere else to go. When their limbs grew tired, they laid their burdens down. Snow scattered on the ground, startling the crows.

 

 

The birch trees are bones picked clean by the wind. Summer’s silver leaves lost long ago.

 

 

I have never loved the trees more than now.

 

 

The snow knows something of letting go, words unspoken, worlds lost, vanishing hour by hour. I think a bush grew there; I can’t remember. My familiar path is gone. I am left with only memories.

 

 

The snow knows too much of death to make a sound. It writes without words — shows, but never tells. See, you will not drown in this white flood. Winter stills the water and commands it to sit at her feet. In spring, the water will move again, seeking the earth’s heart, flowing down, down into the River Lethe, drowning all your memories of this world.

 

 

The blue shades grow large. I watch them lumber across the yard into the night.

 

 

I promise myself I will not forget this day.

 

Writing myself down

Seriously..., Writing, , ,

I sit before the screen as words unfurl; skeins of thought untangle one by one. In silence I knit, undo, and knit again.

 

Above ground, the words grow, limb by limb, empty branches longing for spring. In the hidden place, the roots of wordless thought spread beneath the story that is me.

 

 

 

The truth is, words gnaw at my heart, so I release them. One thought leads to another; I follow, climb skyward, never looking down. I cling to fragile branches that cannot bear my weight. The trees I write, stripped of summer, grow from the tips of from my blue-stemmed hands. Blood flows from heart to paper, as it must.

 

 

The pattern is everywhere. Beauty divides and subdivides into frost, deltas, translucent wings, agates, cells, copper crystals, numbers, and the red river within. Trees of fire touch earth in storms; neurons branch into life. I am part of the pattern. Sentences flow onto paper; the waters merge, drowning me again and again.

 

 

I write the bridge I walk on. Behind me, the past swallows my path. I long to write myself home, a place I’ve never been. Will these words carry me there?

 

 

Had I been free to write these many years, I would have had the time to write myself mad. All those doors shut, the daily tasks that blocked my way, disappointments stealing so much time, every one another mercy.

 

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CREDITS

Copper crystals:  By Paul from Enschede, The Netherlands (Dendritic Copper Crystals) [CC-BY-SA-2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)%5D, via Wikimedia Commons

Sand patterns:  David Lally [CC-BY-SA-2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)%5D, via Wikimedia Commons

Colorado dry river delta:  U.S. Geological Survey 
Department of the Interior/USGS
U.S. Geological Survey/photo by Pete McBride

Veins: http://www.radpod.org/2006/11/08/cerebral-arteriovenous-malformation/

Dr. Marina-Portia Anthony

Frost: Joe Lencioni, shiftingpixel.com

Wing venation:  http://bugs.bio.usyd.edu.au/

Neuron: http://www.plosbiology.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pbio.0040029

 

 

 

 

 

Simple past

Humor, Poetry, , , ,

 

 

Only in grammar

can you guarantee

a past, present, and future

that is perfect.

 

 

I have had my share

of that perfection,

but yesterday,

the verbs were restless.

Some sprouted –ings

and flew around the room

as nouns

as if flying were a thing

to be desired.

 

 

The rest,

tired of being active,

pulled on their participles

and just stood there,

describing things.

 

 

Some of the nouns,

envious of all the action,

broke into a dictionary

grabbed suffixes willy-nilly

and put them on like tails

to strut among the verbs

symbolizing

something.

 

 

So many things were

happening,

And while much of it

was clearly progressive,

I sat in that hubbub

and longed for my

simple past.

A journey and an explanation

Seriously..., Writing, ,

 

Late August, they gave me a map and instructions. I planned my route, studied the names of the rivers, noted the areas to avoid, and headed out. Like all of the journeys before this, I set out with a heavy backpack and a light heart.

I have made this long trek across the months before and knew I would pass some familiar places. My legs, unused to walking after the long summer of watching clouds, complained and then grew silent. My back has never ceased to speak.

I have been schooled in maps, known, and walked them. A map is the story of the road, told true from first to last, but it is not the road. Contour lines, floating on the flat surface like ripples in a lake, are someone else’s story. Your feet must walk the road and find what elevation means.

I follow a path of beauty, canopied by a wide blue sky, days lined with slow smoldering trees that light the way. I know the sun will turn soon and the winds still the fires. I have a long acquaintance with winter.

Faces wait for me at each encampment; they are why I journey. The weary climb, the bruised feet, the hours setting up the camp – all are forgotten when we meet. I offer them my strength, teach them all I know, and trust they will remember some of what they learned for their own travels.

I have journeyed often and I have journeyed long, but I have never been so tired. Mid-October means I am halfway there. In December when the earth sleeps its longest night, I will sit before a fire and rest, tell stories of my trek, and remark on the terrain I covered.

 

For now, most of my writing must be in the lives and minds of my students.

 

The Flusher

Humor, Writing, , , , ,

111a Private Detective Canada Dec-1942 Includes Tell It to the F.B.I. by E. Hoffmann Price

 

 

On the street, they call me Johnny or The Flusher. My father gave me my name, John Flusher. He always hoped I’d grow up to be a plumber like him.

 

 

“Pops,” I told him, “that kind of work drains me. I need some excitement in my life. You know me, ‘danger’ is my middle name.”

 

 

“Your middle name is Mortimer,” he says.

 

 

We didn’t always see eye-to-eye, Pops and me, mostly because I was six inches taller, but he taught me to go after my dreams. “Be a plunger,” he always told me. So when I left home, I plunged into a life of learning how to survive on the streets. Now, I’m a P.I., just like the circumference of any circle divided by its diameter.

 

 

And I got more stories than the Empire State Building. Here’s one of them.

 

 

I pushed open the door, noting the busted lock. I seen the dead monkey when I walked into the room. Next thing you know (which ain’t really the next thing, but to save time, I skipped the scratching of my posterior), I stepped on a big wad of gum. As I looked down at the gooey strings connecting my shoe to the floor, the squirrel says, “Hey, gumshoe, looks like you stepped into another mess.”

 

I wanted to make a riposte, but I wasn’t sure what it was.

 

“I been tailing you, Louie,” I says, in spite of knowing better. All morning my subjects and verbs had been disagreeing, and I needed more coffee to do anything about it. “Your wife sent me. She knows you’ve been putting your acorns into more than one tree.”

 

Louie smiled, pointed to his tail, and says, “I’ve been tailed all my life, Johnny.” He smiled when he said that last line and put his arm around the dame beside him. She wore a fur coat that matched Louie’s and laughed every time he cracked a joke. She had the biggest two front teeth I’d ever seen. When she saw that I was staring, she flashed them at me and said, “Yeah, they’re real.”

 

I jerked my head toward the primate, “Who’s the guy in the monkey suit? And what happened to him?”

 

Louie cracks a nut and mutters, “Just a guy with a big mouth. We called him Howler. I told him to get off my back, see, but he wouldn’t listen. Plus he was a real swinger. Kept making moves on my doll here.” He pointed to a sock monkey the dame was holding.  “I told him to get out of town and I warned him I wasn’t monkeying around.”

 

The dame seemed too classy for Louie, but I could tell she was nuts about him. “Were you here when it happened?” I says, watching her crack an acorn with those teeth.

 

“Louie gave him a chance” she says, twitching her ears. “He told Howler to make like a banana and split, but Howler came out swinging. It was self-defense.”

 

I ignored her. Dames will say anything to protect their squirrel. I looked at Louie. I start off phonetically and asks, “Whadja use to kill him? A hammer, a gun, a steel object, or a Remington?”

 

Louie pointed to a pistol on the table. I walked over to the monkey. Poor sap looked like a PowerPoint presentation, he had so many bullets in him.

 

“Whose gun?” I says (incorrectly) again.

 

“It belongs to my son, Louie Louie.”

 

“Gun of a son,” I says, “I should’ve known.”

 

I walked back to the door and looked at the busted lock. “It’s a Shure Lock, Louie. They’re hard to bust. The monkey musta thought his home was safe with that thing on the door.”

 

Louie eats another nut and says, “Yeah, but Shure Lock homes don’t always keep you safe.”

 

 

 

Photo courtesy: http://www.flickr.com/photos/cthulhuwho1/

 

Fall fireworks

Seriously..., Writing, , ,

 

In deep summer when our fireworks splattered the night sky, the trees watched, admiring our short-lived brightness. Twenty seconds of spangled light is not bad for creatures who can’t sit still and have no roots.

 

Early October the trees ignite a firework display of incandescent reds, yellows, greens, and browns. The lucent leaves flare up, blazing in blue sky for days on end, burning memories on our callous hearts, consuming all our indifference.

 

The month ends in ashes, colors fading to somber brown, but not before the trees remind us that we are alive, that the world is full of pageantry, and that a beauty fierce enough to split the earth, a beauty anchored by desire in time and place, is here, now, waiting for us to open our eyes and look.

 

 

 

 

In the park on an angry day

Poetry, Writing, , ,

 

The house was full of too many words,

so I took the train to town and walked

in the park through the silent, soft

afternoon light among red maples, and

yellow ginkgos. The lake was infested

with greedy ducks. A long orange carp

followed me, or perhaps I followed it,

along the bridge. Ducks paddled over

its head begging for bread. Twice it

surfaced and looked as if it would speak

to me, but apparently thought better of it,

and went back underwater. At the bridge’s

end, a father and his little girl fed the mob

of ducks. The carp swam under the bridge.

We parted without speaking.