The Little Words Mean the Most

I plead

Pecksniffian

I hide inside the term

Christiana & Sean's "Only in America" tour

Click any image to enlarge to life-size.

Eating our first lunch together at Farmstead, a cheese specialty cafe in Providence, RI. Sean has written a fable starring Haruki, so we had to drive to Paris to see that. On Saturday, Sean worked and we went shopping in CT. That afternoon whole party took in our town's rural lifestyle at Foster Old Home Days. We watched an "uncooperative horse" competition. Favorite rider: the girl who couldn't stop giggling. Christiana was VERY eager for a good plate of rough-cut fries ... or as these two Aussies might call them, "chips."

On nearing 57

I carry the weight of the world

on my waistline, bending my spine

 

a broken bedspring.

 

A beetle, big as a rifle bullet,

black as your heart-shaped goatee and rich man's dye job,

 

struggles

upside down

in a roof gutter

 

its paddling ripples

Olympian;

on its back, after each escape

(the many)

 

What's it mean?

The Game Show! "Futility?"

Aaaannnhr!

 

The bug can't drown. He can wash his wing case.

He can exhaust the ration of energy

that puts us firmly among the living

 

not the watched.

From the Lazy Poems series

Life Didn't Turn Out

the way we'd hoped.

 

I suppose you could start 300 million

Great American Novels with the same line

 

wanted to be rich. Didn't happen

wanted to be famous. Didn't happen the right way

 

I am famous to a small group of

mid-brow, mid-level professionals worldwide

who have read my "how-to" books

 

If you consider "the world"

just English-speaking countries

plus France,

as I do.

Life didn't turn out the way we'd hoped.

I suppose you could start 300 million different Great American Novels with the same line.

A cucumber is

an accommodating

if regrettable vegg-etable

judged in expert hands

by so many factors and qualities

 

adhesiveness

bounce

brittleness

chewiness

coarseness

cohesiveness

denseness

dryness

elasticity

fracturability

graininess

gumminess

hardness

heaviness

roughness

slipperiness

smoothness

springiness

uniformity

viscosity

wetness

 

With

many

bitter

enemies

in its field,

many an ambush

between stem and

sandwich

The Worries

Today

I could not bring to mind

the correct way to spell

trout. So I went fishing

 

in pools of possible vowels knowing

it would probably look right

when I saw it.

 

I wrote

troat and it looked right

but didn't sound right so I

wrote traot and that clearly

would not ride the bus

and troate was just Elizabethan hopelessness

 

Which is why I buttress my tower

with dictionaries, crenellations of reference

The fish hid there amidst those pages

 

but then I realized the voicing was

a dead give away: what rhymes with trout?

is out

vs. in

16 Minutes Till

16. How to measure awesome wealth. "Wasting treasure on minor effects."

15. "Are you?" "Yes, I am."

14. Anything that moves on your desk, crush it.

13. "Stop eating from the delusional loaf."

12. "For reasons I know and you apparently do not, you have made a bad decision."

11. The sadness of a breakfast proffered and "I can't. I'm working."

10. "Let us depart and face the flu-ish fears of this swine fall."

9. He thought: I have them half convinced. He didn't know whether he'd see her again. Maybe shopping at the department store, an English invention with a good Belfast translation. He knew he'd never see her again if he stayed a prisoner in this dark pantry. "Larder," she'd painlessly insisted.

8. Who do you want to root for? Pick a character.

7. [blank] I don't know why.

6. "Hobby group vs. advocacy group." Calling for the manyeth time.

5. "I have a glass of wine. I have a fruit fly. Together, we will conquer the season."

4. I'm a cynic, the family priest freely admitted. Yet buoyantly hopeful. What does that make me? Attitudinally androgynous?

3. "I had my fingers crossed so hard the nails turned blue."

2. Me time.

1. "Blessings on your new year." What was the right way to greet a priest, president of a college? "Fuck if I know." Not that of course. No F-bombs.

 

They're here.

Every scene, every step inside that scene,

is a vertebra in a spine that unfolds the story.

The desperation of Madonna

John C was at the club. Met a music exec who toured with Madonna and Chris Isaak. About Chris Isaak: "You love everything about him." About Madonna: "You hate everything about her." John C says: "When it's all about 'I' ... don't expect good results."

Madonna is a Greek myth in live action today in our media. Unfortunately for Pollyannas, we're talking the tragic myths, not the comic ones. Things do not end well for people in tragic myths. Fell to earth. Turned to stone. That stuff.

Was bar gossip in the middle of nowhere right this once? Do "colleagues" hate Madonna? YES! Predictable. Envy of the perfect. Greek myth 101.

Best way to quickly end a long and exhausting phone conversation

"Well, I think I hear my mother calling me. And she's been dead a long, long time." Always works.