Tag: Poetry

Grief Persevering

I’ve thought about Memorial Day this year, and what it usually is: a time for flag waving and troop honoring and over-the-top patriotism for America. But that thought just sickens me. America is broken. It is full of hurt and sadness and evil from a very particular, and thankfully very small, but yet strong, minority. I cannot, in good conscience, praise the troops who fight in wars I do not support with weapons I do not think should exist, when many are dying on my own front door step.

So today I offer a verse in memoriam for those who have died recently in Uvalde and in every mass shooting in my lifetime, which is way more than I care to count. It is a small token I grant, but it is the best I can do right now. 

This Memorial Day
Instead of honoring soldiers
Or cops who can’t police
Themselves, much less others,
I’m grieving insurmountable loss
Not just the loss of innocents
Children parents elders - everyone
Who falls to build another up -
Not a person but an ideal:
“A good man with a gun”
(Such a fucking filthy lie!)
But I forgot, it’s rocks and sin
That murders, not guns and men.
As if rocks could be bothered
Under the metal hail, casing
Each school and supermarket and
Synagogue and - everywhere where
Bullets fly in the face of innocence.
But if it’s sin, then repent of the evil
Of banning abortion, but not guns,
Of decrying politics, but not NRA funds
Of feigning helplessness, but ignoring a world
Where this hasn’t happened in decades
Or has America cornered the market on sin?
But if it’s sin, then repent of the evil in your heart
The evil that loves guns, killers or not.
The evil that won’t vote, to end to stop to halt
The sale of one more AR-15, the failure
To well regulate one more non-existent
Militia. We have a military now, standing still,
To defend us from all threats foreign -
But not domestic. Good guys with guns -
(That filthy fucking lie!)
Stand outside the door debating going home
While the children within will never
Go again. But tell me again how removing one gun
Wouldn’t have made any difference
to the ripped apart
So love your gun, your freedom, your self,
(For what is love but grief persevering?)
So persevere with your righteousness
While others mourn their dead
This Memorial Day.

Guns are absolutely a problem, and while yes, guns cannot do anything without a human agent to set them off, they sure do make it much, much easier. The overwhelming evidence shows that good people with guns have not stopped a single school shooting, and have failed so many other places. Police are almost useless in these cases as well. I am 100% for banning and taking guns away. They are tools of war, weapons of death, and have no place in civilian life. We, as a nation, have simply shown we lack the morality, the maturity, and the mastery to handle them responsibly and they should be taken away, as you would take a stick from a bully child who is hurting other children.

It bewilders me that some will vote for bans on abortion, or books, or whatever else, but not think for a second that banning guns will do anything to mitigate our murder problem. It has, and would again. I amazes me that we fetishize the 2nd Amendment of the Constitution of the United (hardly) States of America, and the Constitution itself as infallible, unchangeable doctrines. Who ever said that the founders got everything right, for all time? Who ever said they shouldn’t be improved upon?

Today, Memorial Day, or any day hence, I will not stand for an anthem, a pledge, or any sort of patriotic theater. That is still my right as an American. I won’t do it simply because the America represented by these displays is not an America I can support or that represents me. Unless and until that changes, I will take the metaphorical, and sometimes physical, knee. Our children are depending on us to change things and to keep them safe wherever they are or go. And right now, we are failing them so completely that it is unbearable.

We MUST do better.

Whiskey Poetry

My book of poetry is coming along very well. You can read more about it here. I recently received feedback from most of my readers, and have been editing poems and getting them ready for publication.

But that is only half of the job.

The other half is a little more difficult, and involves naming the book of poetry and organizing it. I was finding this particularly challenging. For me, naming something is a process that helps me to figure out the soul of the thing. When naming, I define whatever it is in a way that allows me to hold the sum of it in my head. The organization of the book of poetry had stalled because I hadn’t named it and therefore couldn’t fully understand what it wanted it to be.

Sure, I could have simply listed the poems from A to Z alphabetically by title, but that would lack personality and emotion. It would be less a book of poetry and more a listing of poetry. That isn’t what I am going for. So I have been hunting for a name ever since I began this project.

The other day, I was writing a caption for a photo I was posting on social media, and when I was typing “Ten years ago…” I accidentally wrote it as “Ten tears ago…” and the emotion of that statement really struck a chord. It burrowed into my mind and the rest of the day I pondered permutations of that theme. Eventually, come evening, I had teased out something related to a concept that has long been in my head: Graham Greene wrote a novel named The Power and the Glory. It is about a Catholic priest on the run from a government enforcer. The Mexican government has outlawed the practice of the Catholic religion, and this priest, intent on fulfilling his religious duties, is trying to stay a step ahead of the law. The hitch? The priest is a drunk. Because of this, Greene calls his priest a “whiskey priest” to which he adds the idea of a broken, imperfect practitioner of his profession. That idea has stayed with me ever since I read The Power and the Glory and it even made it into three of my poems, to be included in this collection.

So powerful is this theme with me that while I was thinking about it, I realized that my collection of poems could be nothing else but the writings of a “whiskey poet”. I am an imperfect writer, who nonetheless loves poetry and refuses to put down my pen and stop writing, no matter what. The emotion and feeling involved in writing is undeniable and I cannot nullify the effect it has on my life and psyche.

I introduce: The Whiskey Poetry, A Collection, coming early 2022.

Now that I have a title, a theme, and an emotion to build off of, I have begun to have all sorts of ideas about the structure and the organization of the collection. Already I know how, and more importantly, why I want to order my poems as I do. I still haven’t figured everything out, but I have a starting point. I can make progress and build forward momentum from there. I am very excited about what this will become.

For now, though, I have more work to do!

Division of Labor

I am working on a compilation book of poetry. To date, I have written over 150 poems. Of those, I selected nearly 80 for inclusion in my book. After a few rounds of edits, I am at or around 73. I then divided those 73 into 4 sections of about 15 to 20.

My next steps are to make sure that each section is cohesive, that the poems in each section belong with each other, and that each individual poem is as strong as it can be.

To that end, I put a call out on Facebook, to my friends and friends of friends, to see if anyone would be willing to proofread a section of poems. I got five interested readers, so I gave one the entire book, and each of the rest a section. I have received feedback so far on two of the sections, and what I received has been overwhelmingly helpful. Once I receive all the notes from my readers, I will sit down and go back through each poem. Utilizing the notes, I will evaluate each poem in light of the section, the book, and its own efficacy.

It has been supremely helpful to solicit readers. I have already learned things that I didn’t know about how my poetry is received, what is confusing, what is great, and what really works. In my case, some of the poems I had written had never been read or disseminated so it was very helpful to get other eyeballs on my work.

Poetry, both the reading and writing, is a very subjective and personal experience. That is both what is fantastic, and dismal, about the art of wordcraft. Therefore, the final decisions on line edits, poem placement, and even inclusion in the overall book must be mine, but I can be guided by my readers to inform each decision.

Thus far, several things are clear. First, my poems are, generally, pretty good. There is a lot of hedging in that sentence, because I have a hard time accepting praise and recognizing my own merit. To a certain degree, most people have that problem. Second, I organized well on a first pass. I have not had many notes about switching poem order, so that means less work to do going forward. Third, while well written, not all poems are clear, or at least, how what I am doing in each poem serves the whole. I have debated for a while whether or not I should add annotations, and while not every poem needs it, I think a few certainly do. Some explanatory writing may be in order. Fourth, my biggest job will be standardization of the little things, like punctuation and capitalization, except where altered for effect or emphasis.

My end goal is to produce three versions of my book, one for the iBook store, one for Kindle, and one for on-demand in-real-life publication by the end of 2021. It will be tight getting there, but I think I can make it. The hardest job there will be getting the technical formatting and everything correct so that it reads like it is supposed to. Already I feel a little overwhelmed, but that is ok: one thing at a time, right?

A shoutout and huge “thank you!” to my five readers. Their work is a tremendous benefit to me, and my book will be better for it. I will give them all a a credit in the book, of course, but they have earned my eternal gratitude.

a poem

Making the Cut

I am working on a book of poetry. I have written over 150 poems in my lifetime. I wrote my first poem 21 years ago, when I was just 13. Off and on through high school, and then more intentionally in college and afterwards, I would write a poem or two whenever the inspiration struck.

I am not a disciplined writer, and don’t have a daily habit of writing. For a few years after graduating college, I lived in the grey Midwest of Wisconsin. During one particular winter I took Stephen Fry’s book The Ode Less Traveled (Amazon) and went to Barnes and Noble. Utilizing their cafe space, and overstuffed chairs, I wrote poems regularly for a few weeks, following Fry’s breakdowns of classic poetical forms and easy to follow exercises.

Since then, my poetry has come here and there, as the ideas occurred to me. But, as I have said before, I’ve wanted to compile a book of my poetry to date, to have something tangible to hold and to share with the world. I have recently made a few more strides in that effort.

First, I complied all of my various poems. This was no easy task, as they were spread across many folders in my cloud storage, Facebook, here on my blog (search “poetry” as I’ve usually tagged my posts), and even some not digitized in a notebook I use for writing down thoughts. Finding all of them took quite a while.

Second, I started to edit some of the more, how shall I say, terrible? ones into a poem more palatable. Third, I have recently finished the first round of curation. I have marked all my poems, now organized into categories and folders, as Red Yellow or Green. Red are poems that I do not wish to publish, now or really ever, but don’t wish to delete. Yellow is maybe. I haven’t decided if they warrant revision or simply will become Reds. Last are Green, which I have decided will make the book.

Now comes the next stage of work: organization. How to order the poems in the book? I have around 75 Green poems, and they are on a wide variety of subjects. I have seasonal poems, pastoral poems, poetry about Star Wars and superheroes, about the apocalypse and spirituality. Perhaps what I should do is simply have each in its own enclave in the book, and order those alphabetically. I really don’t know. What I feel like I want to do is print them out, and then I can play with organization physically. As they are now, in the cloud, I can’t really sort through them or even see them all at once. It’s one file at a time, or looking at titles in folders. It is hardly conducive to really getting a grasp on what I have.

Beyond that is the literal book itself. I want to do something more creative with it than simply black words on white pages. I have a book of poetry by the artist Kevin Max, formerly of the Christian rock group dcTalk. He has left the CCM scene far behind, and has at various times released things other than music. One being a book of poetry called Po.Et.Ry. (Which reminds me, I need a title, too. Sigh. So many things to work out.) Anyway, Max’s book has artwork, mostly paintings, as backdrops to his poetry. Maybe I could do something similar? I’ve also seen collections that use photography to sit opposite poems, to illustrate or accent. Ideas abound; but few decisions emerge.

Clearly I have a bit of work in front of me. I rather think the easy part has come and gone and the real labor begins. November is rapidly approaching, and with it a tradition called NaNoWriMo or National Novel Writing Month. I haven’t participated in ages, in fact I may have only attempted it once, but I want to participate this year. Only instead of writing a novel in one month, I want to get my poetry book to 85% completion. That would mean: poems in an order, design completed, and a title apprehended. I want to release this book for the beginning of 2022, and I would like to have December to contemplate the monster I will have created and leave time for tweaking. That way I could launch on time. Also, to date, I have only tinkered on this project in little bursts. November and NaNoWriMo would be a good impetus to work on it every day and make a concentrated effort to finish.

For now, I think I need to warm up my printer and start translating this digital book into real space.

A New Hope

Someone once said,
"Inner emptiness is not a void
but an engine of possibility."

I’m less sure. My hollow bones
are no raging krayt dragon.
Instead: a bleached skeleton in the Wastes.

Destitute droids roam by in search of home
while I lay thirsty and long since dead
of any ambition, a desperate howl in the desert.

What I need is a whisky Jedi to lend my corpse a cause,
some damn fool idealistic crusade would do,
anything to get my fighting blood astir.

Maybe my Jundland is territory to be traversed?
Could a broken old speeder carry my spirit to Eisley
in search of a wretched hive of hope and potentiality?

If so, come Lord Kenobi! Help me, as only you can!
Together could we find redemption,
a watering for our beleaguered souls?

I’ve been feeling very dead and dry inside lately. A lack of motivation rules supreme. For instance: today I slept most of the day. I didn’t feel particularly depressed or down, but I just couldn’t find that spark to get me going. I’m not proud of it, its just what happened. My sensei of sorts, Adam Savage, has a saying that “This is what is happening” which means that you need to embrace what is instead of inviting frustration or other negativity about what you wish could be. So I slept.

Having to work this afternoon kind of broke the spell of nothingness and got me going a little. I listened to a few upbeat songs just before my shift, and that got me going a little more. Then I started thinking. And then I wrote a poem in between working. I don’t know if it is a good poem, I don’t concern myself with that. I simply try to write the best damn poem I can at the time. And I don’t usually explain my poems, but I thought that maybe this time the exercise of explanation would do me good, so here goes:

I read a poem recently, and forgive me, I don’t remember where or I would quote and link to it. But the epigram for my poem is a paraphrase of that verse’s main idea. That poet said that our skeletons house a vast emptiness, but the turn was this idea that instead of being empty, we are full of untapped potential.

I feel dry inside. That always makes me think of deserts, those beautiful tracks of desolation that cover large portions of the rocky part of our planet. Deserts make me think of Tatooine, the all-desert planet from Star Wars. And from there my thoughts started to race with the Star Wars metaphors. My skeleton became that of the krayt dragon that R2-D2 and C-3P0 trudge past in the beginning of the first Star Wars film, A New Hope. “Wastes” refers to the name of that Tatooine desert, the Jundland Wastes.

That “desperate howl” is the noise that krayt dragons make when on the hunt, and which Obi-Wan Kenobi imitated to scare off the Tuskan Raiders who were assaulting Luke Skywalker. That leads naturally to Old Ben, who here is a “whisky Jedi”. That idea comes from Graham Greene’s The Power and the Glory, a story about a “whisky priest” that is, a drunk priest who struggles with doing his priestly duties and searches for redemption. I imagine that Obi-Wan is doing the same thing while hiding out on Tatooine and protecting young Skywalker. I wonder if, like he energized the bored Skywalker into his career as a Jedi, maybe Kenobi could do the same for me.

That phrase “blood astir” references another poem “Vagabond Song” by Bliss Carman in which the speaker says that “there is something in October sets the gypsy blood astir” by which is meant that the fall climate and trappings fires up the need to wander. I’ve always loved that poem, and here I bring in that idea that I need to be roused and my longing for an Obi-Wan Kenobi-type to set me ablaze.

From there I begin to wonder if maybe my desert, again the “Jundland Wastes”, is merely a time to be traversed and not a permanent dwelling. I call to mind Luke’s rusty X-34 landspeeder and the spaceport he and Kenobi raced to, Mos Eisley. I turn the tables though on that seedy city, a “hive of scum and villainy” as Kenobi calls it, instead reimagining it to be a hive of “hope and potentiality” as it really was a place that launched Kenobi’s resurgence and Luke’s emergence onto the galactic stage.

Finally, I liken Obi-Wan to a Christ-like figure of redemption, both his own as “whisky Jedi” (further tying in the religious aspect of The Power and the Glory) and mine from the desert inside my bones.

There you have it then. Just now, writing the poem and the explanation was exorcitive (did I just invent that word? I mean it was an exorcism of my soul). I feel loads better just having that out there and working through it in the writing for any who may read this poem and explanation. I don’t know, maybe it will do you good as well. I hope so.

Glimpse of Mortality

I’ve been close to death before, but it was quick. A move of desperation, grim faced and full of rage, daring the Reaper to take me. Then I rushed to my senses and swerved to safety.

But this past winter, I was made to stare into my own mortality and really contemplate the end. I was made to live with the knowledge that each labored breath could be my last, that if things went sideways or southwards, I’d be headed for my end.

I was one of millions who contacted the Covid-19 virus and it sent me to the hospital. I had survived a year of mask wearing and lockdowns and restrictions, but at the turn of the calendar, I got sick. One dark night, I tried to go to sleep. I have sleep apnea, and wear a cpap mask to keep my airways open. But even with that, I couldn’t fall asleep. Even with that positive air pressure being forced into my lungs, I couldn’t grab a breath. Into the night, sitting up in a recliner, I labored to breathe.

Eventually I texted my wife, unable to get enough breath to shout up to the bedroom on the second floor. Eventually I woke her up, and told her I needed to go to the Emergency Room. All the way to the hospital, I felt fear take hold. Unlike my previous suicide attempts, when I desperately wanted to die, this time I desperately wanted to live.

All year, I had seen the death toll rise world wide. I had read and heard stories of healthy people succumbing to this virus that sometimes seemed innocuous, and sometimes seemed vicious. I began to be terrified that I would never leave the hospital alive.

We arrived, and I sat alone in the waiting room, struggling to breathe. My wife wasn’t allowed to sit with me, to reduce the risk of infection to those healthy of the virus. Fear settled in to stay. Eventually I was taken back for a few questions and tests. I was given oxygen and a wheel chair. I could breathe easier, but inside I was still gasping, grasping for a hold on the moment.

After forever, I was taken to a room on the ER floor. An oxygen feed kept me breathing. After a bad night during which I didn’t sleep a wink and was reduced to deep indignity (no nurse was available to unhook my IV and in desperate need of relief, I shit my pants and pissed all over the room floor and still waited 15 minutes for help and a janitor to clean up my mess). But that was nothing: I was being admitted with a severe case of covid.

What followed was a week in which I was sequestered by myself in a hospital room on the fifth floor. A friend visited, but we talked on the phone and saw each other from 30 feet away through a window in the wall. He wasn’t allowed closer, being a nurse himself caring for covid patients. I couldn’t see my wife, and could only call her. I still can’t imagine what that week was like for her, alone and herself afflicted with a milder case of the virus.

I spent my long hours staring out of the window, watching the weather and thinking. For the first time in my life, I really contemplated the fact that I could die. The doctors, not seeing improvement, started me on steroids and a powerful drug (I don’t remember what it was called) to try to fight the infection. I was so scared, though I put on a brave voice for my family when they called. I kept thinking that healthier people than me had lost their battles with covid.

Eventually, after a few days, I did start to get better. In the end, I spent a full week in the hospital. I was discharged on oxygen and with a bucketful of meds, healthy enough to finish my recovery at home. I was finally reunited with my wife. It felt so good, though I was weak and still finding it hard to breathe.

It has taken me much longer to recover psychologically. Thanks to my doctors and the medication, my body got stronger and I could surrender the oxygen and I could walk up the stairs without getting winded. But the fear has only recently loosed its grip on my heart and mind. With my covid vaccine, I now am starting to feel that I might live a while yet.

No longer will I take life for granted. Never again will I tempt the Reaper. I know now that my life is precious. It could flee from me at any moment, after all, I could get into a car accident tomorrow, or something else could happen. The permanence of life remains an illusion.

But I deeply appreciate my life now in a way I didn’t before. I am gentler with myself, more accepting of my flaws and foibles. They aren’t as important or devastating anymore. I have been given a perspective I lacked before. I was flat where now I feel dimension. And all it took was a real look into the specter of nothingness. I wouldn’t wish covid on anyone. I wish I never had that experience, but I cannot deny the change it made to my life. It has taken me months to publicly talk about it in this way. But I find it important to acknowledge what happened.

I feel my life has begun in a new way since January. I feel I am living a renewed existence. And it feels good. Life still hurts and is confusing and messy and frustrating, but at least for now, I am breathing. And that’s not nothing.

One of those days when I was just lying in my hospital bed, I wrote a little poem. It isn’t anything profound, but I find it beautiful, and it is these little moments of beauty that I live for now. Life isn’t guaranteed, never was really, so I am about catching the little moments of beauty while they last.

The city,
wreathed in steam,
dominates only a small portion
of my windowed horizon.
An industrial plateau stretches ‘round.
What I took for a flock of birds,
frozen in the sky:
dirt on the windowpane.
Low winter clouds buttress the sky above,
grey and bleak and lit from far away.

- view from A5110

Solstice

Today’s poem is a focus on duality, inspired by the word solstice. Enjoy.

My soul is halfway in shadow,
and halfway in light.
Standing between night and day,
depending on how I turn,
I can see no end of either.

I behold an enduring brightness,
or I perceive a far darkness.
Either I squint against sunlight,
or I struggle to glimpse in black.

One is not good, the other bad – 
(avoid that trap of understanding) –
They are both as themselves pure.

The long and the short of it is simple:
allow both to orbit as I stand,

preserving the eternal solstice.

Diaspora

I feel more hopeful today, like a corner has been turned. The word of the day is diaspora and I’ve applied that idea personally. I hope you enjoy.

Time to gather my wayward-
thoughts? feelings? emotions?
However I call them, they must answer.
I need the diaspora to end.
I need myself, once scattered,
to be one and whole
for the rest of my days.

Too long I’ve been flung
wide and far on the surface
of many troubled waters.
Time to aim the flotilla home,
time to guide the armada to harbor.
Then I can scuttle the fleet,
and sail no more away from home.

The homeland lies empty, waiting.
I long to return with unity at last!