21 Tuesday Feb 2023
My Philosophy:
If you see it, chew it! Eat!
The world’s my pantry!
Warm day sun? I pee
So instantaneously!
Cold rain? Lazily!
I run I jump I
Turn and twist and catch the ball
You’d have let it fall!
Food! Stick! Water! Ball!
The world is my ground to play.
Look! Another day!
Remember: take time
To stop and eat the roses!
ARF! It rhymes with BARF!
Sticks and stones may break
My bones! So I eat them all
Instead. Problem solved!
———————
A Suddenly Springing Something
19 Sunday Feb 2023
Posted in design rationale, fiction, poetry
Here’s the context of the sonnet below. It is written by a sixteen year old fictional character who is nerdy, smart, and a bit on the Asperger’s spectrum. He’s also not a very experienced poet. But what I try to show is that he improves a little as he goes, falling back to teenhood toward the end of the poem. Why doesn’t he just keep improving? Because when he gets close to the true nature of love in lines 7-11, he realizes if he keeps going with this, he will be changed forever. He’s giving up partial control of his life to someone else. And it scares him so he backs off from that and just tries to show off how he can write a sonnet and be cool and funny.
Ultimately, I may or may not include the poem in the novel. If I do, I’d be inclined to add the inner dialogue of the Main Character as he’s creating the poem. I can see it getting too tedious for the reader. By the way, Edgar Allan Poe wrote a lengthy and detailed design rationale for “The Raven.” Notwithstanding that fact, there are many other folks who have a different interpretation. That’s fine. But it does remind me that if I do write a design rationale, it’s not as though everyone will say, “Oh, well that’s that then. The author has gone and told us what he meant and why he did what he did. What more to be said?”
And, of course, people do go on and there is more to be said because we know intuitively that none of us knows our complete design rationale. Others see patterns in our behavior that offer quite different hypotheses about why we do what we do. It doesn’t mean that they are right and we are wrong, but it does offer an opportunity to learn—about them as well as ourselves.
Promise me Prom
I really love the way you always smell
Like soap and flowers, pie, fresh bread.
Your sweat itself smells swell and sweet.
Which proves I think you’re competently bred.
Your hand is warm—I want to gently hold
In mine and you will feel my love is true.
We each will be both molded and be mold.
Your grip is gentle breeze upon the blue.
Your grip is strong and long and steady steel.
Your eyes are portals to the worlds-to-be
I want to know it: what you know and feel.
I want to be yours for eternity.
Let’s you and I become both ROM and COM
I’d love to have you date me for the PROM!
————-
Sonnet on Sadie
Sonnet on Shadows
Sonnet about Sadie
Sonnet about the Extreme Court
Sonnet about V. Putrid
14 Tuesday Feb 2023
Posted in nature, pets, poetry, psychology
For Valentines Who Feel Alone
I’m digging in the science zone
A place unlikely you might think
To find a touch that’s soft and kind
To substitute for kiss or wink;
But here’s what floats into my mind:
If once you loved and now love’s done,
I tell you that it’s never done.
The lover’s kiss forever lingers
So too the madly roaming fingers.
But Love is more than memory’s touch
It’s also wind and rain and such:
The breeze, the bird, the buzzing bee
The rose and blooming cherry tree
Your love and lovers are in these.
Forever round the atoms go
So why not love the rain, the breeze?
Of course there’s pain yet even so—
Cold winter stings of snow and ice
Yet warmth of heart’s recall is nice.
Each bird and beast of earth is kin.
From birth we’re taught our clan is thin.
But life, in truth, is all One Tree.
We’re all connected, don’t you see?
Alone is how we’re trained to feel.
To stare at plastic, cash and steel.
While all around us: Family.
Love every creature large or small.
We choose our love’s diameter.
It’s something you may choose to do:
So, you can choose to love it all.
Or, keep your circle very small.
You get to pick parameter.
Your sphere of loving? Up to you.
How the Nightingale Learned to Sing
The Walkabout Diaries: Sunsets
10 Friday Feb 2023
Seeing Sadie standing in the daisies
Helps me deal with the crazies;
When she’s got her muzzle grounded
It helps me stay robust and rounded.
Sadie is a golden doodle
She doesn’t look much poodle
But she’s just as golden as can be
In the sunlight she’s just as she as she can be
Which also makes me feel more me.
She romps along the beach
Chase and chasing anything that isn’t still.
Tries to meet and greet by nosing each
And every moment is a lifetime’s thrill.
At end of day, she dreams her dream
Tomorrow is another day
For her to spring and sniff and scheme
For her to turn the world to play.
The Walkabout Diaries: Sunsets
The Walkabout Diaries: The Life of the Party
The Walkabout Diaries: Symphony
The Walkabout Diaries: How Beautiful and Green
The Walkabout Diaries: Bee Wise
03 Friday Feb 2023
Freaky Friday and French Fries come to alliterate my mind.
Do you recall when we called them “Freedom Fries”?
Do you recall why we called them ‘Freedom Fries’?
Because the French didn’t join in our Second Gulf War.
We’ll show them!
We’ll show them!
How many times in your life have you heard someone say that?
How many times in your life have you said to yourself: “I’ll show them!”
And how many times in your life did that actually work for you?
Here.
I’ll raise my hand and volunteer to go first.
And the answer is:
(Drum roll please!)
And the answer is:
(Longer, louder drum roll! Don’t forget to ready the cymbals too!).
And the answer is:
(Maybe we should lead into the drum roll with a simple flute solo).
(Maybe we should let the violins pick up the tune and let the whole string section join in).
(Maybe there’s a brass counter-point).
If we decorate this house of cards ornately enough, perhaps we can slide right by the answer which is:
Never.
I’ve shown many things to many people and taught such things as:
How to design an experiment.
How to conduct an interview.
How to do Analysis of Variance.
How to tie a shoe
How to throw a spiral pass
How to serve a tennis ball
But never once
Never once have I
Successfully shown anyone anything by being mean.
Freaky Friday and French Fries come to obliterate my mind.
When did making fun of a friend make them a better friend?
Ever?
Here?
There?
Anywhere?
Hmm…
Next time, I think I’ll just offer some ketchup.
29 Sunday Jan 2023
Posted in America, poetry, psychology
Garden or guard?
How does your garden grow?
How about your guard?
You see what I’m getting at here?
I hope not.
Not yet, anyway.
To put it another way,
How much for plowshares?
How much for swords?
How much for love?
Or for planes above?
Planes that have bombs.
Bombs that explode
Sending shards in every direction.
Killing anyone around.
It’s not just a loud sound.
So this is a killing for willing and unwilling alike.
Soldier in hiding or a boy on a bike.
And, yes, it is true.
A garden unguarded can be taken from you.
But do you ever wonder
How far down the killing path
We must go
To guard our garden?
Let it grow?
How does our garden grow?
How about our guard?
And, speaking of guards.
Are we really guarding what needs to be guarded?
Are we really sure of the guards who guard us?
Do we arm every school bus?
Avoid walks in the sun?
I once dreamed of a tall skinny man
Who built a nice garden with veggies and green
The nicest plots I’d ever seen
So he was happy for a good long span.
Until he began to insist on a wall,
The tallest wall but that’s not all.
Upon the walls, hired shooters sit
The garden’s gone to weeds and silt.
The alarm awoke me to a sunny day.
And I forgot the dream until today.
Thank goodness that nightmare’s done.
I’m so happy that type of error
Is never for the the daylight air.
Never for the real time fare.
Aren’t you?
—————-
24 Tuesday Jan 2023
My Sadie is a sniffer and a sifter after clues.
The rainy days I find so gray and nondescript,
To her, are better for odiferous wetter news
She finds in dew on every bush and blade she’s nipped.
She finds the flights of crows a mystery and a soar
She loves the lights that twinkle in the starry sky
Not only now and then but now and evermore.
She follows — Wait! — the scent of rabbit wanders by!
The dislocation of my shoulder’s no big deal!
We can’t let that become priority o’er prey!
How can a merely human soul resist her zeal?
She streaks through every scene of every act each day.
And then…she snoozes with her head upon my feet.
How oddly weird that dogs make humans feel complete.
A Suddenly Springing Something
The Turtleets
21 Saturday Jan 2023
The Kevin said he’d lead the band!
Be strongest man in all the land!
But when the traitors came to slay,
The Kevin hid then ran away.
The Kevin blamed the Trump that day!
But soon, it seemed, he flew the coop!
To Florida to eat a scoop.
And there he pledged to be a wimp.
For coups and couscous be a simp.
For nuts & guns, he’d play the pimp.
And now he sits atop his throne.
He reaps as sown; his cover’s blown.
He brags that now he leads the band!
When really he just pounds the sand.
The saddest man in all the land.
Pretends to power; total slave.
And here’s the really foul deprave:
By wanting all the power for him.
The Kevin’s just a shadow limn.
There’s nothing left of what was him.
A rootless rot upon the land,
He opens gate for treason’s band.
So bent upon his bid for power.
He lost it all in shameful hour.
The joyous tune has turned note sour.
Bereft of honor, truth and heart,
Robotic role – a walk-on part.
The words upon his lips are dust.
As Putrid speaks, so Kevin must.
His mettle now just rotted rust.
How the Nightingale Learned to Sing
Beware of Sheep in Wolves’ Clothing
20 Friday Jan 2023
Posted in nature, poetry, psychology
The walls are steel.
The walls are high.
The walls are strong.
The walls are long.
Drip.
The soldiers train.
Sunshine or rain.
The soldiers march.
The soldiers march.
Drip. A peasant shares her bread.
The lash is long.
The money tempts.
Cruelty rules.
Lewd one drools.
Drop. Drip. Someone truly cares.
The king lacks love
Wears iron glove.
The lackeys obey
Every day.
Drip. Drip. Drip. Another chooses love instead.
Ozymandias too:
He strove to do
What can’t be done.
Not done by anyone.
Pitter patter. Pitter patter. Another someone dares.
Agent, spy, tank and gun.
They cannot keep you
From your golden grave
But weapons do deprave.
Splash, splash. The understanding reaches flash.
Afraid of brains,
The kings use chains.
With freedom gone,
Creativity drains.
Muddy waters roil.
Burble as they boil.
Lashes wound but waterfalls
Become a tide of epic fails.
All who live in stony jails
Hear the sirens; hear the calls.
Dripping drops become a tide.
A mile high, a hundred wide.
At last we learn the hidden cost
Summer simmer, frozen frost.
At last we see the trees.
They bend and twist
In twos and threes.
Forests die while hates persist.
Fires, floods and famines find
Fertile land for odious brand.
Brigand, brag, and burning branch.
The Golden Rings to powers bind.
And after all has burned to hell.
And nowhere left is fit to dwell.
Then at last will everyone see.
We didn’t have to play for greed.
We could instead have planted seed.
And let the water gently fall upon the land.
We’d Eden in our grasp it seems.
Instead we joined the bang-up band.
Drip. Drip. Another act of kindness turns the tide.
A tidal wave a mile high, a thousand miles wide.
(Or we could turn this ship of fate
And open every heart with gratitude
Alter every selfish attitude.
Live and love and dance and mate).
The answer lies with what we do.
Not just me. And not just you.
It’s what we all could choose to be.
We could save humanity.
We will save humanity.
Not just me. And not just you.
The answer lies with what we do.
It’s what we all could choose to be.
18 Wednesday Jan 2023
Paradise Lost
(First appeared as part of The Poetry Exchange’s Featured Poet, Spring, 1997 under the title: “Deforested”)
Gray day wasted while the whippoorwill
Wishes that the slushy city sewers
Had not replaced the only lonely home he knew.
The groggy foggy unfocussed hurly-burly rushing
Of splashing autos on the gray macadam roadways
That gnarl through the neighborhoods
Is vaguely deja vu.
Silhouetted smokestacks shadowly seen,
Limned in gray on gray-green,
Remind the mind how poor people pass the day after day.
Where no home fire hearth lighted cabin
In the winter woods beckons, beacons, hearkens
Heartily a red sunset glow on white snow
For a day’s work done.
One hardly knows.
Here, where machine clouds of steam unsentiently sip, sap the soul,
You wonder as the rain water wanders,
Then rushes through the gurgling gutters,
What foul trick man played upon his own brave soul,
To have forsaken all the fiery emotion that makes life great
To sit at desks, to stand in lines, to wait.
Where are the country color and
The rich thick loves hidden
Beneath the inventions, interventions, and pretensions of society?
We wander in our own gray-glass cages
In a lurching kind of mock-precision,
Like the nightmare dream of a psychotic technician.
And the only color the commuter encounters
In his travels to and from,
Is the scarlet and the gold of a raccoon
Too stupid to stay off the highways of modern civilization.
————
Pet Sematary (A relevant book by Stephen King which was a partial inspiration for the poem)
Isn’t the extinction of species a “normal” thing? Yes…and no. https://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/blog/2019/05/nature-decline-unprecedented-report/
How many animals are killed by vehicles? https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/roadkill-literally-drives-some-species-to-extinction/
How much “labor” is actually “saved” by our “labor-saving devices”? https://www.reddit.com/r/antiwork/comments/qbgihm/for_95_percent_of_human_history_people_worked_15/
