I just found myself rubbing my palms together in the kitchen and thinking, “Time to write some bad poems about whatever. Time for a bad poetry week!” One of the biggest obstacles to writing is fear of writing something bad. So, we have to find ways to embrace the bad, to enthusiastically nod our heads and step into the bad. I remember at my ten-year high school reunion, feeling kind of stiff and awkward when it came to dancing. My friend turned to me and said, “I just do my goofy dance,” and his arms went loose, his whole body let go of tension and he became a rubber chicken. I tried it and it was incredibly liberating. If you’re going to dance, dance. If you’re going to write, get goofy, get loose, and instead of letting bad snort and tease and shut you down, walk directly over to bad, hold out a hand and invite bad to the dance floor.
in the tent by the lake
the water makes its voice
heard
licks the rocks all night
humming yummy yummy yum
and the wind grabs Tent
by the cheeks
pinching, shaking, shouting,
You look like-a mamma!
The rain falls in socially distanced drops
kerplop plop
ping
a pingping
a patterpatterpatter
then breaks into
a doowop a boowop a pingy pingping
SPLAT!
In the lake by the tent
Tent peeks out
under half lidded rainfly
smiles sheepish
guffaws, awwwwww
turns redfaced
can’t believe its own glory
When the clouds see the tent
it’s the rightquick glance
of a flying elephant
snorting wispy cloudboogies
Hey Tent, why not fly?
cue trumpet
gone
In the undermarsh, below Tent
creepycrawly squishy intellectuals
pace caverns and corridors
looking up,
wringing mollusks
adjusting antennae
the world has ended!
Il mondo! Il mondo!
Great Tent has landed
Sitting on the dock of the lake
with murmuring sorelle in Tent behind
two posts frame frothy ripples
like finger goalposts
for flicking triangular paper footballs
in math class
By the side of thedock
tucked, everlasting,
the big rock talks to the lake
stern, granite, shoulders above water
Rock barks, haw haw!
eagley eep yippityyip
Wow wow blippity blip wow haw!
imagines smattering applause in the wind
Rock beats chest
gazing out to lake core
tries to formulate a granular idea
but needs years
YEARS
to capture next thought
never gets a word in with cheeky cheeky birds
sputtering yeehaw jetski
and even slow humans
if we could just remember
to pause a millenia
Rock would surely supply a witty rejoinder
women are from Venus
Men are from Mars
and Rock is from Earth
and this is a dimple
filled with happy water
and by it sits
a palace made of air
curved poles
stretched nylon
mesh
and soft cotton
A travel blog for the post-, mid-, pre- pandemic lifestyle. This is the night before heading out. No, I’m not heading to Senegal, like you, or off to Croatia, like you. Nor am I wisely staying home, like you, you and you. Just heading east. Capital E, really. And capital C. East Coast. There’s a lake awaiting. Family. A folding chair and a good book. It’s raining now, it seems, but just a blip, a thunderyawn, a conflaguration of uppity clouds.
I will ride with my family to the San Francisco airport in the early hours and we will fly out over this great divided nation of lunatics and elitists, of the misinformed and the misinformers. I’ll pull out my chilango chess set and ask my son, “A game?” and he’ll say, “I will play but not right now.” He means it, but…isn’t there only right now, right now?
I’ll look back out the window, down through the wispy clouds at the red and blue checkerboard nation. What a mess, what a mess. I’ll fly like James on his giant peach, heading for the Empire State, well, Jersey really. Down below, sharks, seagulls, well, redhats anyway. And bluehats.
And then there’s just Gladys. See her sitting there in her rocking chair on her porch? She’s waving to you and me. Gladys doesn’t care if you’re vaccinated or planning an insurrection, just so’s you’re neighborly as you pause your stroll. If she offers you a cup of coffee, or something stronger, you’d better say yes.
Tomorrow, we cross this confused land through the air, if the BART trains are running and the airplane leaves the ground. We’ll trade it in on the other side for a rental car and drive a landscape we barely know, from Newark, over the Hackensack, cross the Hudson, follow the coast — Who came up with this coastline??? It’s a landscape I don’t know anything about. Up the coast, make a left at Ragged Rock, cross the Connecticut, and find your way.
Hard to imagine all that, sitting here in my chair.
I climbed on my
pedal powered bicycle
blue helmet like a dweeb
and verily flew down the hill
to the independent bookstore
I climbed off my seat
tied the reins to the post
and ambled into the store
(my bike whinnied behind)
into a store?
into a store
out in the world?
out in the world
the booksellers carried on
their conversation behind plexiglass
as I pumped covid killing goo
and rubbed my simple hands together
eager and clean
eager and clean
I was searching for a birthday book
for my curly-haired friend
(we met in the dorms,
he was clutching The Autobiography of Malcolm X)
I held up Murakami’s new short stories
but it was glossy and unpleasing to the eye and hand
I put it back down
I found instead the Moscow gentleman, written by Towles
a fabulous read I just read
slipped it into a brown paper bag
and was gone
pedalling across town
dodging potholes and pushers
(someone under the underpass was removing the tires of a car)
until I reached my friend’s sunny street
I sat on a rock
and wrote on the brown paper bag:
“Just another paperback book
from an independent bookstore
delivered by a pal
on his pedal-powered bike”
I knocked on his door
and handed him the bag
and the paperback book
had a quick chat
and was gone.
Imagine that!
a paperback book
you can hold in your hand
a bike powered only by my legs
a friend somewhere in the world
and a bookstore filled with books
all still in this world.
Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste is so amazing. I’m just returning to it after a fiction detour (I take a lot of those). Check out this quote from a conversation she had with civil rights historian Taylor Branch in 2018, discussing the surge of racist violence under Trump. Branch says, “So the real question would be, if people were given the choice between democracy and whiteness, how many would choose whiteness?”
who is more intelligent
a leaf or a human?
a leaf drinks golden light
cleans air of harmful gas
understands water
and uses all three to make sugar
feeds mama tree
grows in good company
a human eats mush
throws applesauce on walls
screams NA NA NA NA
dirties diapers
grows teeth at high moon
NA NA NA NA
trades mama milk for 7-up
gin and tonic
crashes car into tree
a leaf does not linger
grows, saves the world
changes colors
and then lets go,
falling in perfect tumble
to the ground
a human plants a tree
if lucky
helps a child learn to read
sings at weddings
finds friends
wonders what the hell does it all mean?
begins to shrink
wraps fingers around steering wheels
clings to the bitter end
NA NA NA NA
Imagine living like a leaf
knowing which way the wind blows
growing, saving the world
changing colors when it’s time to change
and then letting go,
falling in perfect tumble
flipping slowly in the sunlight
slowmo final flash of color
flickering flipping
down down like a rock lobster
down
singing NA NA NA NA
NA NA NA NA
Hey Jude
Hey Jude
landing on the ground
in good company
How do you actually resign as president of the United States? Is it enough to just write, “I hereby resign” and sign it? What if you forgot the period? Or do you have to use an exclamation mark? Can I call you Mark? Are there other verbs allowed under the Constitution? I quit! I hereby Step down? I’m fired? I’ve decided to go in a new direction? Would it suffice to write “I didn’t want this job anyway!” in shaving cream on a West Wing mirror?
Could you, I don’t know, if you hadn’t been banned for life…resign by tweet? What about a post on a social media platform that you just started by Executive Order (where your only follower is Don Jr.)?
What if you took an Ambien and resigned by accident? Are there take-backs?
Is there a presidential big red button or a little hand-held radio, like in “Alone”? Can a president “tap out”?
“I kind of had it made but then I set my own shelter on fire. I’m tapping.”
OK, back to bed.
If you are carrying around the weight of the world today, as I am, as the plot takes a terrifying turn with Supreme Court voter suppression and the clear evil master plan to steal the election surges forward…
Remember you need to breathe. If the air is not on fire or filled with smoke, you need to get outside and walk.
You need to put on music and dance, even if it’s your angriest dance.
You need to dust off that guitar or violin or clarinet and just lose yourself in music for a bit.
Not to escape. Ever vigilant. Determined to do everything you can every day to bring the bastards down and save the nation…
But you have to free up that tightness in your chest, a few times a day. You have to stretch with your favorite song blasting.
You have to stop scrolling, looking, listening to it all, for stretches of time, and open a book, and do nothing else. Scratch out a drawing. Pound on some drums.
The purpose of the news is to get informed and then act based on that information. The purpose is not to have a heart attack, not to let your anxiety meter burn past red. The purpose is not to lie face down on the floor, defeated. Know when to to turn it off and heal.
We are here now. Take a breath. That’s your breath. The system of your body is keeping you alive for some purpose. The planets are rolling through silent black space.
You or someone near you is healthy. Celebrate that.
Make a nice bowl of soup for someone you love.
But please don’t carry the weight all day, every day, without music, without breath, without dance, without a walk or a ride or a run. Find a tree. Stare at the tree. Watch the breeze move the leaves or needles. Let your two dimensional digital mind unfold, expand, breathe. Let the record in your soul spin. Hear you heart beat.
We are good people. We are angry. We are strong.
We will eventually make the bastards pay and move past these feelings of desperation.
Sending love from Oaktown!
And so it came to be that he tossed upon his gilded bed. And an angel visited him and spoketh thus, “Yo, Man, that sh$% you been doing is so f^&$^ed up.” And suddenly deep in his…well, not soul exactly, but his cavernous selfhood, he felt the stirrings of something new and painful yet glorious. And when the fever broke, he called up ol’ Joe and said “Sleepy…er, Joe old friend, I’ve seen the light! I am withdrawing my name from consideration!” And he called upon his friend Joe and Joe’s friends to take leadership then and there of the nationally coordinated assault on covid. The previous “leader” of the effort, found playing Mortal Kombat 11 in the dungeons, was informed of the change with a post-it on his forehead. By the next day, a national mask mandate was in place, the most generous stimulus package yet was signed, sealed and delivered, and the military were sent into every community to deliver high quality PPE to the schools and nursing homes and neighborhood health clinics. And it was good.
