Summer Air

Inside the windows fog over. I wonder:
Do the water droplets collect on the
Inside of the window glass or outside.

I sit and wonder this. Somewhere
Deep inside the radio speakers
Tinkles a piano.  I turn up volume
And rollick to Pepe Romero's classical guitar.

Only the noisy cicadas
Outside the foggy windows.
Inside, the smell of fresh paint
and figs rotting in the wooden bowl by the window.

Everywhere mosquitoes, ubiquitous biting bugs
And even the bottled water tastes like iodine.

A new poem from a series

I'm going to Henry's Place to cry
While I sip diet Coke in the dark
Alone in a crowd of shadows
between me and the internet
jukebox.

I like this short poem because it highlights my efforts to quit drinking beer in the dark with strangers.  I like to get out of the house and hear live music and visit with friends.  But yesterday I found myself writing this poem anyway. So there will be a series of similar rhymes rhythms, and relationships.

On fire

Click click.  :)

I am like "on fire" tonight.  Really can't sleep.  Lucky it is Saturday/Sunday.  Oh well, so much for making it to church.  I never make it to church anyway.

janlo surpreated furit compawere.

tired and not making any sense.  Not code.

Old Seinfeld episodes are sunning through my head and I am amazed that Seinfeld is in the auto spell.  I am amazed at a lot of things these days.  I am so amazed I have eyes in the back of my head and remember my past life as a cave man.

This is all just a rouse.  Afoot is the game of life
It ripples across time
Through the void

We are a node on a wave train
Bound for unknown destinations

And singing

ALP

American Life in Poetry: Column 511

BY TED KOOSER, U.S. POET LAUREATE

 

Just as it was to me, Insha’Allah will be a new word to many of you, offered in this poem by Danusha Laméris, a Californian. It looks to me like one of those words that ought to get a lot of use. Insha’Allah  I don’t know when it slipped into my speech that soft word meaning, “if God wills it.” Insha’Allah I will see you next summer. The baby will come in spring, insha’Allah. Insha’Allah this year we will have enough rain. So many plans I’ve laid have unraveled easily as braids beneath my mother’s quick fingers. Every language must have a word for this. A word our grandmothers uttered under their breath as they pinned the whites, soaked in lemon, hung them to dry in the sun, or peeled potatoes, dropping the discarded skins into a bowl. Our sons will return next month, insha’Allah. Insha’Allah this war will end, soon. Insha’Allah the rice will be enough to last through winter. How lightly we learn to hold hope, as if it were an animal that could turn around and bite your hand. And still we carry it the way a mother would, carefully, from one day to the next. 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 ©2014 by Danusha Laméris, from her recently released first book of poems, The Moons of August, Autumn House Press, 2014. Poem reprinted by Danusha Laméris 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.

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....