An American Life In Poetry #502

I attempted to read this poem at the Trapped Truth poetry group this afternoon.  A technical error made its completion impossible as the last couple of lines were missing.  Here is the poem in its entirety as promised.
~Tim

Many poets have attempted to describe the way in which flocks of birds fly, as if they were steered by a single consciousness. In the following poem, David Allan Evans gives us a new metaphor for the way light shows through the flying birds. Evans is Poet Laureate of South Dakota. Sixty Years Later I Notice, Inside A Flock Of Blackbirds,  the Venetian blinds I dusted off for my mother on Saturday mornings, closing, opening them with the pull cord a few times just to watch the outside universe keep blinking, as the flock suddenly rises from November stubble, hovers a few seconds, closing, opening, blinking, before it tilts, then vanishes over a hill. American Life in Poetry is made possible by The Poetry Foundation (www.poetryfoundation.org), publisher of Poetry magazine. It is also supported by the Department of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Poem copyright ©2013 by David Allan Evans from his most recent book of poems, the Carnival, the Life, Settlement House, 2013. Poem reprinted by permission of David Allan Evans and the publisher. Introduction copyright © 2014 by The Poetry Foundation. The introduction's author, Ted Kooser, served as United States Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 2004-2006. We do not accept unsolicited manuscripts.

Rummage Sale by Jennifer Maier, who lives in Seattle

Here is the first installment of an ongoing poetry collection  ~Tim

I’d guess everybody reading this has felt the guilt of getting rid of belongings that meant more to somebody else than they did to you. Here’s a poem by Jennifer Maier, who lives in Seattle. Don’t call her up. All her stuff is gone. Rummage Sale  Forgive me, Aunt Phyllis, for rejecting the cut glass dishes—the odd set you gathered piece by piece from thirteen boxes of Lux laundry soap. Pardon me, eggbeater, for preferring the whisk; and you, small ship in a bottle, for the diminutive size of your ocean. Please don’t tell my mother, hideous lamp, that the light you provided was never enough. Domestic deities, do not be angry that my counters are not white with flour; no one is sorrier than I, iron skillet, for the heavy longing for lightness directing my mortal hand. And my apologies, to you, above all, forsaken dresses, that sway from a rod between ladders behind me, clicking your plastic tongues at the girl you once made beautiful, and the woman, with a hard heart and softening body, who stands in the driveway making change. American Life in Poetry is made possible by The Poetry Foundation (www.poetryfoundation.org), publisher ofPoetry magazine. It is also supported by the Department of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Poem copyright ©2013 by Jennifer Maier from her most recent book of poems, Now, Now, University of Pittsburgh Press, 2013. Poem reprinted by permission of Jennifer Maier and the publisher. Introduction copyright © 2014 by The Poetry Foundation. The introduction's author, Ted Kooser, served as United States Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 2004-2006. We do not accept unsolicited manuscripts.

Got poem published in HenryHarbor.com

What do you know?  I got a poem published in HenryHarbor.com!  It's the one you probably read before called "Quanta: A temporary lull in the painfulness of living.

Not much else going on today.  Maybe tomorrow I will feel like writing more about what I have been up to lately.  Remember to have a sense of humor, whatever that means....

Exploring Tricycle magazine

http://www.tricycle.com/

The Poetry Foundation's Mailing List

I just joined the Poetry Foundation's mailing list online.  You can do the same by clicking here.  I am anxiously awaiting what I hope will appear in my email and snail mail soon.  I write a lot of things.  Unfortunately, I don't read enough targeted material that fits my interests as often as I would like.  Maybe this mailing list will help me, maybe it can help you too, if you join the list for yourself.

You might think I am about to submit all the things I have self-published on this blog for their review.  You would be wrong.  Unfortunately for me, previously published work, even the stuff on this blog and my other one thoughtshadows.blogspot.com, cannot be submitted for further publication.  "What a bother!" you might exclaim.

Well, I see it as an opportunity and motivation to write more.  Wish me luck if you would like to do so.  And maybe you will see some of my work in Poetry magazine.  Stranger things have happened, don't you agree?  I am so excited....

Don't worry.  I will still self publish comments and such things on this site.  It's just that I feel I have a chance at magazine publication at some point, now.  And I think I have been mis-targeting my ability to write creatively by making my otherwise marketable work available without compensation.

Cheers.  There is plenty more where this stuff has been coming from.

The Indignation of self righteous counter-productivity

Lately I am working on recognizing and avoiding self righteous indignation at work and leisure.  I did not realize how often I suffer from such delusional thinking until Henry and, then later the same week, a co worker also used the phrase "self -righteous indignation."  It gave me pause for thought and I wondered if that is what has been undermining myy career ambitions.  Who knows?

The joke today was a decidedly African American joke.  It is very simple:  "Bye Felicia..."  That's it.  That's the whole joke.  It is an inside joke based on a tv show or movie or something.  I was too amused and distracted to ask exactly where the joke originated.  But what made even me laugh is when a veteran employee heard us use the name Felicia and inquired in his deep voice, "Who's Felicia??"  

We all laughed.  You say "Bye Felicia" to someone apparently when you tire of listening to the babble on or gossip or whatever and he, the inquirer, is a notorious gossiper.  You see how funny that is?  Claro que puede!!  Of course you do.

Just let the ethnicity of the joke slide right by and chuckle about this.  Later I told the night manager, that in England the name Felicity is more common among caucasians than in the US and is based on the same Latin root word meaning "happy."

You know what she said?  Yep.  "Bye Felicia!"  

Arghhh!  A funny one liner for the late Spring 2014.  What do you think?  Did I tell this correctly enough to entertain?

How to live without attracting too much attention

Leaving no trace upon the land
Universal harmony
Uncluttered mindfulness
Sleep takes to the dance of dreaming
Ideas pilfered from the other side of consciousness

they drop from my memory like falling stars
Are they not followed far to find the nighttime oasis within?
To see the galaxy of which we are part,
the Earth waters must be deep and still resolving its hazy details
And the moon is a much easier focus of nocturnal reflection

Tell them you saw the stars reflected in the water
We still romance the stillness of the night.

The dystopia phenomenon

Why is the future so often portrayed as dystopian?

Coming down after years of riding the veils
Between the reality in the fractional dimentions in your mind.

You and I,whether we know it or not:
Trapped within childhood spells.
Wrapped up in the distractions from matters at hand
To feel the cosmic breeze and weightlessness of pretense.
To come down from this among people you knew, who are now
Older than you remembered; expected them to be:
Brings a tear to your eye.  And you flee the company of old friends
To reconnect with the ghosts inside your head.

All Aboard

I was writing yesterday when this science fiction Idea came t me from out of the blue.  So I caught as much of it as possible on paper here.  There's other stuff I have been working on too like just a regular fiction short story but I am way closer to being finished with the intermediate poem here than I am to being finished with any novel or short story.  It will come together when it does.


A learning situation on board an

alien spacecraft with our distant

human ancestors  Say cave men

on a spaceship I think I saw that on

Star Trek once.

They measured the ripples in

quantum probabilities and charged

up a dimensional capacitors to fold

space and get back home.

Quantum interference around

habitats with intelligent life earths

interference pathways are full of

interference as the nature energy

began to network develop like

auroras on the horizon

as Earth shakes and stutters

around the energetic yellow sun,

They told the freshly shaved and

cleaned humanoids everything

about nature and in a wild way they

understood and accepted what the

utter reality of this allsank in to their

prodded minds

Earthlings are no stranger to death

so they accept that one or more out

of 10 may not make beam up/

Hit it with enough force to be just south of cracking that planet wide open and yeah I believe there have been mass extinctions in the past millions o years.  Ain't it great to be human?  But how vain we are sometimes when all around us is evidence connecting what we do directly with nature.  We think we were sewn here by a higher power like seeds of animals brought to life and only indirectly connected with and responsible to nature.  But there we are wrong/

So I am kicked back listening to Brian Eno on Spotify eventually I will go to work.  Eventually I will get home and eventually my eyelids will get heavy and I will fall asleep.

An impromptu poem from March 2014

Tom Waits is one of the coolest horse loving dudes that I know.
Now that I think about it,
A lot of dudes that love horses
Are cool.

Horses meat is eaten in Spain
They say it is good
But lots of people like horses too much to eat it,
They say its like eating dog or something
And I can see their point,
Still, Id try horse sometime
Given enough red wine and a crowd At Carnival ouotside the bar.

Tom Waits might not like to eat horse meat though.

He might find sentimental reasons

But he might say as well as I do

That given enough libation and a big enough crowd

Many people will do lots of unusual things.  

In the 60 70's ppl discover quadraphonic sound

Just look at discotechs

A sort of synchronized mob.

Under the strobe 

Under the scope

Under the spell of Babylon

Or a paradise jubebox.

Under the strobe 

Under the scope

Under the spell of Babylon

Or a paradise jubebox.

Looking up you notice a cloud 

floating across a moonlit sky

And the prefectly-formed 

cumulocirrus cloud is Inside the 

ampitheatre.  

This alarms you briefly

But the pulsing crowd reintergrates 

your attention again.

Smoke and mirrors you whisper

Against the din And think of the girl 

the one that did not bring you here 

tonight.  You think of what your 

companion from the last summer 

might say and sway to the currents 

of fresh air which  makes you feel  

like kelp in the ocean, then your 

date, who you love dearly, now that 

shes away, grabs you by your elbow 

and leads you down the dim blue hallway.

Dr Who Vs The Snake Creatures

the internet just a fog of techno
electrogonadatropins more than  just foggy audio
And visual

the sudden clap of bulky sheets of rubberized energy erupts to a scene.

The idea of multiple biologically parallel palaces in the extra galactic dimension of space time where being everywhere at once and the no where at all do make a probabilistic kind of sense shuffle
through scales in the power of 10

To About -- now!

Foucault, foggy duel
Between the humanoid
Vs. intelligent space snake
A Dr Who episode in the background
Along with a young Pat Metheny on the "gear up" shifting chords for a long haul guitar solo.  Cymbals crashed like fireworks on the horizon.  An electric hilly bass guitar punctuates the regal
Fall of night this winter.
Snapping
pistols at ten paces breaking my bones in ten different places.
Yet
the snake creature losses the bet
And a barefoot humanoid gingerly Steps out side and
Places an anachronistic step
Next to a bigger fresh dinosaur print. Then he seems to change his mind once more and steps back into his hissing time machine.
A long fog follows!  Between the sun and the Earth and eventually the moon until the latest sentient humanoid emerge from disorder
Angst  and huge bets against entropy. The Big bang was just monumental moments before the flash from polliwog to artificial intelligence, a trippy trifle to the spinning, smiling fog that broke out into a star and awoke the spirit into
gazing back into the illusive navel of creation.  On scales both big and small, we wink into the mirror and gaze into the microcosm and macro-petri dishes and dare to gaze into tomorrow.

New Poems from 2014 ("Impossibly Far Away")

Here is a rough stone I hewed from the slab of local reality
I copied bits into other poems and polished them for word choice.
The key word for this was fog and there was fog and thunder storms when I wrote this.
No cooper or tin in these lines Below
Just the bronze, mixed molten, the "old fashioned" way:



snapping and ice and slipping and  slicing through the mist, you,
All at once
You turn and twist


Floating on cold liquid water like
A frozen fog
But not  You hit like a heavy mossy trunk and shivered yourself unconcious.

Awakening icicles sway and curve
Against the bearded and opaque
Northeast wind

The moaning of clouds
Heavy and decending like
opinions from the Judges of the Sky

Then, Wooden tables and chairs
Illuminated by flicks
of afternoon lighteniing
over cold water corn bread

The knot of your accident
A faded memory of foggy
pain dull and deep in the mind.

The plenty sustains through sickness like cooper pennies at a time.

The patches and pennies of humidity you watch
Roll across the afternoon
and loiter there until moonlight

Dancing like the rain through
grape covered valleys in a very algorithmic, barometric, halographic, pattern recogniton
your visage morphs and unfolds changes in the glows of green aurora of of the forgotten time machine and the doorway to the Snake Aliens visit to South Am

Doing fields study in alternatives to  anthropology theories
From my off line laptop listenig to the frosty, fogcutting hornish melodies of Miles Davis called "All Blues."

At night: it designs deluxe light shows  and
In the mornings,
Sheets of it float above the warm updraft columns like throats of loons.
And they part the low shadows with the cold howls of four-legged nocturnal
Purveyors of the moon,

Vapors from above
Through the nose
Across the brain
Like pungent blue cheese

In the back of my mind
The perfumes of the night
Were caught in mid air between the back of my throat and a dancing happy uvula frozen like the ghost of a taste of blue cheese and rosemary on a farm fresh wheel

the green beans we cooked from the damp fields last night, tasted like asparagus this morning.  So lifted the trance of sleep and you hurried off to shopping malls and other urban maze-like jungles liberated by the slow coating of light ice
To see everything bow and turn white

The city paused and looked around, happily entangled in a no zero sum game One ship we sailing to run groundsomeday  on friendly shores impossibly far away and obscured.

And ( as a high school English teacher mighgt say) what is all this stuff about 9 dimentional space idea.  I think that is like the newest wild theory from our friends at CERN where the super collider is located.,  They seem to think that reality really has 9 dimensions rather than just 3 or 4 that we are aware of.  EVEN THOUGH THESE DIMENSIONS ARE ALL AROUND AND INSIDE US BETWEEN US AND NEITHER AT THE SAME TIME!  Sorry about the caps.

That really kinda makes me think like in the same way that I think when on a clear night I look upward and see millions of millions of galaxies and stars.  The dimensions we see there exhibit the extreemes of what our puny minds can even imagine.  And all that the ones who study it can about reality in an every day sense.  What does it have to do with me?  I ask to snap myself out of that navel gazing trance.  And there I see no similarities between  social sciences and sub atomic physics.  Yet both offer some glimpse into reality.  Somehow the definitions of subjective and objective break down due to scale.  The properties could blur into grey as we so often expect.  Particle or a wave?  waving or drowning? drowningly return to nature, naturally emerge from the dream, into another stylish delusion, deluded wake to flower scents and see yet more of creation

A spacewalk to put eyeglasses on the Hubble, we have satellites (plural here) orbiting Mars and rovers drilling holes in rocks by remote control on another planet in this solar system!  Will we ever ever be able to populate the entirety of existence before the fabric of time itself burns away and leaves behind the ashes cold and scattered abstracted out of existence.

Or will it be possibilty to exceed the limited universe as a final leap into the multiverse?  A shade of objective v subjective possibilities.  The grey of the abmbiguity and discover.  The spacecraft leaving the heilopause for the first time entering intergalactic space.  We are now the subatomic life in the pertidish of the solarsystem.  Wait on the dawn of what becomes of humanity beyond the earth.  After focus on spelling and modus tollens arguments about evolution.  Things seem much simpler now.

Quick Update from the Presnt 9 dimentional space idea

If only these posts could be read in reverse order.  Yes, I just read a year's worth of my posts -- all four of my published posts from 2013.  And I am tired tonight.  Its 31 degrees outside and I am at Henry's after eating tripe soup again with lots or "OraGano" and onlions and cilantro,   (I have lost my ability to spell well again since I have not been typoing this blog so much lately)

But today I bought new heath insurance from the nice insurance agent.  She was extremely helpful to both Eric and me.  I finalized my decision today after getting a paper from Louisiana Medicaid that I would not be eligible for their program.  So I am trying it this way for now and into the future, until we see what might work out.  Yes, I really hope Obamacare works in the long run.  Living in North LA I understand some serious reasons that things might not work out.  They are not all rational reasons: like the self fulfilling prophesy reason.  They say it wont work so it doesn't just because They say it wont.  Or worse yet because a Democrat group thought of Obamamcare, the Republican group just cant let them win.  It seems to me a lot of us vs them thinking.  Or the thing might just go bankrupt.  But then I don't really buy that a health care system can alone bankrupt its own people.  That seems ridiculous too.  Or it least it should be mathematically ridiculous to think about  Statistically or some such.  We may be a sicker nation than some may realize.  Or we may need to price things more compassionately and work on accepting the idea no one lives forever.  Americans seem to have an existential crisis at every sneeze.

But me, I have continued to work at my minimum wage job and found that I have accomplished several things so far:  I joined a money management program to alleviate my debt issues in four years time.  I have increased spending on groceries and decreased spending on dining out.  I have increased the time I spend focused on positive thoughts  I have helped to maximize profits at the job by using marketing strategies I have analyzed my budget using common business practices and accounting procedures.  I have endeavored to improve my memory, get more rest and decide how I feel about current even issues in light of there bearing on the future of this great nation.  I have to say after a year 2013 of contemplation I can still say optomistic things about the future of this country and my own modest future as well.  As long as the devils of hatred and slavery and elitism egotism and greed don't rise up and bite us anywhere it would be difficult to fend of their dastardly attack.  I have become involved with a poetry group again also and that is fun to meet with others who write for fun and entertainment.  I make that meeting every other week and we sit at an internet-less pizza place and eat salty cheesey and tomatoey bread and drink no beers but instead sip on soda.  I am thinking about getting the veniue changed to the Naked Bean coffee shop where there is still no beer but atleast there is the internet.  Naked Bean --  what a funny name for a coffee shop.