The Little Words Mean the Most

Are we just victims now?

 

The scam came that close.

         We're old. You have to wonder: Are we just victims now?

         Are we prey? And, if so, why not?

         My father spent his last two years in a nursing home. He'd graduated high school into the Great Depression; slogged through WW2 as private first class; endured a disdainful wife and her princely son (that would be me); worked in a factory until he retired.

         Dad's vanities were few. But he appreciated watches. Not extravagant Swiss status-pieces, mind you. He appreciated dependable, durable watches that told time accurately. He went into his last nursing home with just such a one on his hairy, mottled, thinning wrist. Someone there stole it, cunningly swapping his Hamilton for a drugstore Timex, to conceal the theft.

         We are prey.

         And don't you forget it.

 

 

being CLEVER is for STUPID poeple

 

greetings, pasters

laura diane (your old house is collapsing) greg (your "masterpiece" is well-maintained) bob & offspring-ish

lostintime

 

it will be and you will be and i will have been: an adoring testament to you all

 

what happens when

you no longer have to worry about what it costs

can we afford it?

we'll see I guess

mostly we milk the irony

drop one in the bucket: thank you to so many who worried alongside

drop two in the bucket: will this heal anything?

having money at hand facing America's 2020 healthcare system?

couldn't hurt ~ or hurts less but even ready cash

has a border and an abyss nearby

 

LEDE: I always assumed it would all turn out normal

 

[book in progress]

 

My First Real Kiss / And Last Days

I always assumed it would all turn out normal.

Whatever that might be. That was the gift from my parents and my hometown and my family. That normal was here, commonly available, at anyone's fingertips. You had to try; not a lot; just enough to get by.

I must say, though, looking back 72 years: it turned out harder than I suspected.

But what are you going to do?

Organisms are organisms. Values are values. Infrequently do they agree.

 

https://www.crisisaid.org/

 

why not?

 

 

 

Window Open poems

 

there's so much to learn about patterns

you need to listen ~ I forget

crack a nearby window ~ I forget

a goose squadron transects the silence ~ I forget

a who-who will arrive and ask

a nudging wind will say breathe please

it's good for you

 

 

What I scratched into the stall wall, then to bed

 

        

That global NGO "industry" is an untidy skein of causes; thick, messy cable: a surging (unstoppable?) movement which (I believe) just MIGHT — in the end — save (no guarantees; it's up to you and me and billions more) our savagely suffering planet — as government and the so-called "adults" who "run" that part of our lives prove themselves inadequate, inept, shortsighted, self-absorbed, corrupt and emotionally-stunted cynical assholes no better than their 5th-grade selves.

         And since (I suspect) many FOR-profit corporations should simply be quarantined as infections ... as several Nobel-laureate economists will (MORE suspicion) demonstrate via research a half-century from now (that gargle you hear? me praying) ... when they prove that a benign-seeming modifier such as "industry interrupter" is in truth a synonym for "sociopath."

         Ear buds aren't what they seem. But, yeah, you knew that.

 

 

in my absence

 

swept the table

nope

 

Memoired: The first review

 

"One of the most extraordinary autobiographies I've ever encountered. It is unimpeachably honest, insightful, intimate, touching. The interpolation of war stories and war facts works and will have particular meaning for people of my generation, whose childhood was penetrated by the war in so many ways. An exceptional book." Robert Wexelblatt

 

Robert Wexelblatt is an accomplished fiction writer, essayist, and poet. Among his books is Life in the Temperate Zone, and Other Stories, which Fred Marchant, writing in the Harvard Book Review, described as a volume of "fine and gentle stories." Wexelblatt's style in this 1990 publication is rather demanding, for he employs a rich vocabulary and shows a penchant for the more intellectual, and somewhat absurd, aspects of life. The fourteen-story volume includes a tale in which a professor notes ties between Edgar Allan Poe and baseball; one featuring a musicology student who studies under a professional wrestler; and another about an aging professor determined to dissuade a former student from suicide. Marchant praised the book, "[The book] is laden with wit, wry observation, gentle sarcasm, and wicked ironies."

 

My Father's War Stories. As Told By Toys.

 

My dear friend, artist, storyteller, play advocate and copywriter, Sheena Greer, gifted me with some cover ideas. They weren't, in the end, used by the publisher (Pelekinesis also had good ideas). But I loved Sheena's solutions! CLICK to enlarge any image.

 

asyou suspected

 

 

he thought, If

more things could be safely done while drunk

I'd get more things done.

definitely though the chain saw on a pole

a tool I own

like a head on a pole

scares me all the way to doubt

 

see

I once in my life (add it to our archives, mumsly)

chain-sawed trees in our this? backyard

to carve out a better? view

while at the time same time

standing firmly

 

on murderous, cruel, unforgiven

MMM-NO-UNH-UNH-NO anthropomorphic ice

thick as clear body armor spread

across our backyard every

acorn dead bug root pine back view

needle mat and the down slope

 

An angel goes into a bar.

"Who's the clumsy, drunk one?"

I slipped footloose freeforall

 

my chain saw still running

toward the sunset

curving toward the old drystone

walls of this defunct glacial volcanic New England dairy farm