Monthly Archives: February 2015

The War of the Words (Love and War)

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 The War of the Words

The words packed tight within my mind
seek the empty page.
They fly like hummingbirds and hawks
escaping from their cage.
But when all my empty places
I seek to fill again,
too many words rush in at once,
creating such a din
that nothing can be made of them.
I cannot restore order
in these alien syllables
that flood across my border.

I did not think these previous lines.
They just crept up on me.
I place them here upon the page
and thereby set them free.
They have no place within my head
where I had plans to write
a valentine or love poem.
Instead, they spar and fight.
One trying to beat the others
to the front line of my mind.
Love words elbowing their way
through “sensitive” and “kind.”

So shyness steps on anger’s toes
and sloth runs out of steam
trying to reclaim the place
where words like it must dream.
I no longer know the purpose
that I set out upon
I fear the mood is broken–
my concentration gone.
The thought that any love poem
will come is now absurd.
Ten minutes ago I was in love,
but now I have been cured!!

The Prompt: Write an Ode to something or someone you love. Bonus points for poetry.

Happy Valentine’s Day!!!!!

Greatest Things

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The Prompt: Most of us have heard the saying, ‘That’s the best thing since sliced bread.”  What do you think is actually the best thing since sliced bread?

Priorities

One thought swirls around my head.
What’s so great about sliced bread?
Its fame is just a piece of bunk.
I’d rather just tear off a chunk.
There are other things about
that are much harder to do without.
Toilet paper is number one.
Life gets quite grim when there is none.
Without ketchup, fries taste bland,
and lest we all get over-tanned,
best keep sunscreen close at hand.
A shot of rum is just a joke
unless submerged in Diet Coke!
So let’s get our priorities right.
Just grab a loaf and take a bite!!!!

Finally, a bit of time to post.  I’ve missed it.  Tomorrow I have nothing scheduled in the morning, so hopefully I’ll be able to post then as well.  Richard Blanco gave a wonderful reading yesterday..Gloria Steinem speaks Sunday.  So many good workshops and readings and speakers here at the San Miguel Writers’ Conference.  If you can, give it a try next year.

First Light

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Write a post about the first thought you had this morning.

First Light

I’m in San Miguel de Allende for a writers’ conference.  For the past few weeks it has been rush rush with a number of deadlines and obligations, then a day to pack and attend to a number of duties before I left and then a six and a half hour drive, alone, using a route I was not too sure of.  Luckily, I only got lost once and enroute was able to listen to the entire book, Revolution from Within by Gloria Steinem, one of the conference presenters.

So, when I woke up this morning, my first thought was to glance at the alarm clock, set for 7 a.m.  The room was still dark, thanks to the opaque shades, but the 6:44 glowed out in brilliant red large numbers from my bedside.  No chance to write to the prompt today and not even any time to post at all.  I turned off the alarm, showered, discovered I’d forgotten to pack my toothbrush, climbed the two flights of stairs to the cold dining room and ordered oatmeal and papaya, then drove across town to the conference site.

Since then it has been rush rush rush all day, carrying a too-heavy computer (I’ll leave it home tomorrow) and a big box of books for the book tent that I couldn’t find time to take in…Finally, I’m rid of them and any obligation for the next half hour or so, so I’m lying on a blanket on the grass behind the hotel, actually writing electronically for the first time today.  Too far away from the first thoughts of the day to remember what they were.  Too tired to try to fabricate them.

Alice Walker will be speaking in half an hour.  A few hours ago, Tracy Chevalier, the author of “The Girl With the Pearl Earring,” gave a wonderful talk on historical fiction. Hard to go away from these conferences with any faith in your own writing at all after hearing the words of such iconic writers.  So I turn back to the comfort of my blog, and you who read me, feeling snug in this safe world.  Thanks for being a part of it.

Pictures to follow later….

https://dailypost.wordpress.com/dp_prompt/first-light/

Sweet Clover

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Sweet Clover

Before our dad told us its real name,
we used to call it wild mustard.
What did we know about sweet clover except for its color
and that summer smell, cloying in its sugared perfume.
It filled the air and smothered the plains—
bright yellow and green where before
brown stubble had peeked through blown snow.

On these dry lands, what flowers there were
tended to be cash crops or cattle feed.
Sweet clover or alfalfa.
The twitching noses of baby rabbits brought home by my dad
as we proffered it to them by the handful.
Fragile chains we draped around our necks and wrists.
Bouquets for our mom
that wilted as fast as we could pick them.

Summers were sweet clover and sweet corn
and first sweethearts parked on country roads,
windows rolled down to the night air,
then quickly closed to the miller moths.
Heady kisses,
whispered confessions, declarations,
unkept promises.
What we found most in these first selfish loves
was ourselves.

The relief of being chosen
and assurance that all our parts worked.
Our lips accepting those pressures unacceptable
just the year before.
Regions we’d never had much congress with before
calling out for company.
That hard flutter
like a large moth determined to get out.
Finding to our surprise,
like the lyrics of a sixties song,
that our hearts could break, too.

Hot summer nights,
“U”ing Main,
cars full of boys honking
at cars full of girls.
Cokes at Mack’s cafe.
And over the whole town
that heavy ache of sweet clover.
Half promise, half memory.
A giant invisible hand
that covered summer.

 

The Prompt: The Transporter—Tell us about a sensation — a taste, a smell, a piece of music — that transports you back to childhood.

The World Is Too Much With Us

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People here are funny. They work so hard at living they forget how to live.”
Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936)

The World Is Too Much With Us

How was life when we didn’t know everything?  Back when there was no TV and when news got shared once a day on the radio and once on the door stoop in the morning?  We were so busy with our own lives that we didn’t spend every minute of every day bound up in the ills of the world.

Violence was a neighborhood game of cops and robbers, but nobody really ever identified more with the robbers.  It was more a game like kick the can, where you were trying to keep something away from the other side.  Violence was not the point and when I look deep, I know that a game of cowboys and Indians was no more an expression of prejudice than listening to a World Series game of the Yankees against the Dodgers was.

To rephrase a quote from Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936), I have to say that people of the twenty-first century are funny.  They work so hard at living they forget how to live. I include myself in their ranks.  I am so tied to my computer that I panicked recently when I spilled a Coke on it and had to go a few days without.  My day felt strangely empty even though I had an entire ocean and beach spread out before me and a small town full of people to talk to, a porch full of art materials.  But, I’d become so accustomed to my blogging world and even to talking throughout the day via Skype to a very dear friend, that I didn’t know what to do with a day that was just a day in one place with one set of people around me.

Existence has become a thing that has no value unless I can write about it and I don’t seem to be able to write anymore unless I am writing into a computer and sending experience out into the world.  I am committing, perhaps, even more of a sin than those teenagers glued to their hand devices, texting their friends. They, at least, are connected to someone,  whereas I simply talk to my computer and send out copies later.

Who is most at fault is not the point.  The point is that connection with the world at large that keeps some of us from a simple and private connection to the world immediately around us.  We know so much about so many things we really don’t have much control over, that we have become voyeurs. The entire world has become grounds for our gossip.  We are fascinated by the gory details, shocked but in a sort of fascinated daze that keeps us many times from realizing that this is more than a movie. This is reality.  Someone’s pain.  We feel it for those seconds and minutes and hours and days that the horrible action stays in the headlights of this rushing vehicle that is our world, but then we pass on and it is as though one program has ended and the next begins.  We think about world events in episodes.  Off with the old one, on with the newest slaughter or murder or coup or genocide or monster storm or hostage situation.

In the meantime the minor tragedies around us sometimes go unnoticed.  We are so fixated on the stories of major tragedies on the other side of the world that we forget the real people and small dramas going on around us.  We watch nature shows on television while ignoring what wildlife still exists around us.   We suffer the passion and pangs of romance as onlookers.  Observing the great chefs of the world takes up time we could have been baking chocolate chip cookies.  Watching Honey Boo Boo in horror becomes a punishment in comparison to  sitting in a playground, watching children living the world in real time.

Yes, what I write is hyperbole, but I think it is true, to a varying degree, of most of us connected to the technical world. It is like a horrible accident passed on the hightway that we are told by our mothers to look away from.  Who can resist?  No matter how much the gory scene may invade our dreams and turn them into nightmares, we cannot look away. And now with TV and the Internet, we could spend 24 hours a day watching such horrors. And often do.

There is such a thing as being too connected to too large a world.  This is why I disconnected the dish network and cable years ago.  The bad news still leaks through, as does the good news, but in quantities I can take and that leave time for real experience and a perhaps misplaced faith in the world and human goodness and yes, even my own goodness.  I am beginning to try to spend more time away from the computer–to simplify, if that is possible in this busy cluttered mess of a life I’ve once more collected around me.

I find the valuable elements slipping away and less energy to collect more around me.  Friends die and move away both physically or emotionally.  This is the process of life.  But it is also the process of life to stay engaged in a real way and to fight for meaning and value in our lives.  This should not be so hard.  There should not be so much to plow through to get to ourselves and what is really important.  The Mr. Deeds quote, in modern context, might be altered to read, “We work so hard at observing and being in contact with the world at large  that  we forget how to live in that world.”

The Prompt: Silver Screen–Take a quote from your favorite movie — there’s the subject of your post. Now, write!

Mexico Adventure, No Fatalities

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Mexico Night Adventure, No Fatalities

Leaving that swinging small
coffee house art opening of a friend
with the party still roaring
behind me,
I shift to uneven cobblestones
to avoid the nightly
taco stand set up on the sidewalk,
knowing I must be careful,
but pitching forward anyway,
face-down in the dark street.

Seconds later,
still in thrall to the fall,
thwacked shoulder,
scraped palms.
As I lie in the street,
a crowd gathers
like otters to survey
this new intruder to their world.
I can’t stand up.
Lie groaning in the dark.

They offer twenty hands to help me up,
but I need to lie a spectacle  in the street.
Should they call an ambulance?
Can I not rise?
They ward off cars, enfolding me
in their curious and protective circle.
No way with any amount of help
can I push myself up from the street
on this pounding knee.
I become their Saturday night
entertainment.

At last, unable to bear the shock
of pressure on any part of either leg,
I scoot myself over on my bottom to the curb,
hoist myself up to sit on it,
and from there
my right leg can get contact with the street to push.
Two hands help me up and go around me
as I hobble the half block to my car.
Yes, I can drive.
But everything hurts.
“Muy Amable, Senor, y muchas gracias.”

At  home, a straight-legged hobble down the stairs.
Neosporin on the skinned and swollen knee,
Rum and Coke, Advil, Reumofan
in that order.
Arnica and Peyote gel rubbed in sore parts.
The safety and warmth of bed.
and eight hours respite
until that long climb up the stairs
to the last day of my own art exhibition.

It is hard getting old in any country,
but in Mexico,
cobblestones furnish
their own private Hell
that all gringos fall to,
sooner or later.

(The prompt was to tell about the last time someone was proud of you, but It’s hard to be proud in the dark on cobblestones in Mexico.)

Weekly Photo Prompt: Scale

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 Photo Prompt–Scale: This week, share an image that highlights a size relationship — make us pause and take a second look to understand the scale of the elements in your photo.

Anger (Anagram Poem)

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With my Open Studio to set up today, I don’t have time to wait for the Daily prompt, so instead I’m using a prompt suggested by Sam Rappaz. The Prompt: ‘Anagram poem‘. These poems are adopted from the word games that we find in newspapers. The rules are: End words must be derived from four or more letters in the title. Words which acquire four letters by the addition of “s” are not used. Only one form of a verb is used. (Thanks, Sam Rappaz. You can see her Anagram poem here.)

Just for the fun of it, I’m going to try to use the words Anagram Poem for the challenge, but instead of using those words as the title of my poem, I’m using a word derived from them:

Anger

All through our lives it lingers near.
It hovers close over her infant’s pram,
where his mother’s soothing words manage
to calm his cries of distressed rage.
Yet what he sows is left to her to reap.
His distress squelched may turn in her to anger
as at midnight, with the seventh remop
of the day, the angst supressed all day is allowed to range
unfettered, growing from a silent pang
to a depression best escaped from with a rope.

Who imagined this, that wild night after prom
when he first held her breast, a glowing pear,
and she, at last, met his questing grope
not with a “No” expressed clean off the page
of the pamphlet given by her gram;
but rather by a passion that rang,
on that one night, truer with every groan.
His muscled back, her throat, her golden mane.
Her naked thigh pressed to the gear.
For once, her lover given no cause to mope.

And for a day, a week, a month, that golden night remained a poem.
Until the time-worn ending added one stanza more.
Telling her grandma and her gramp.
That long journey up the nuptial ramp.
That fast trip from teenager to ma’am.
With lightning speed, from car seat to manger
and the clock watched, and his absence, and this overpowering midnight rage.

 

Home Rule

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Home Rule

The laws of society, made by such a complicated process, are ones that we seldom set about trying to change.  We follow some laws and break others. We pay our taxes and do not steal or litter, but we speed now and then, smoke a little pot in the wrong place, as decreed by state law, and sometimes stray onto private land.  These are small departures from the law which, not taken to excess, hurt no one including ourselves.

The bigger consideration for me is the rules I set for myself.  I often over-complicate my life by the intricacies of these rules.  Whether they are set up  because of the expectations of others or myself is something I’ve been examining at great length lately.  Why, when I entertain, is it so important to me to create a complicated meal worthy of company?  Why must I fuss over the table setting, the music, getting the house just right?  I know in the back of my mind that such things do not matter as much to those invited as they do to me, and yet I feel driven to stage the occasion, to create a memorable event–a happening of sorts.

This is a rule I somehow made for myself long ago and I can’t break the habit.  This is a need for me that over-complicates life and makes me less willing to entertain since to do so demands so much time.  Am I capable of slapping a pot of chili on the table along with a stack of bowls and some spoons and letting others help themselves?  Can I point at the fridge and ask them to choose their pleasure? Use paper napkins and mismatched glasses? Put a bottle of salad dressing or ketchup on the table rather than putting them into a bowl?  Would doing so detract from the pleasure of guests?  Would it even detract from my own?

I fuss and fuss with everything.  My art pieces are added to and subtracted from for weeks or months before I finally make a decision, choosing from thousands of objects stowed away in compartmentalized drawers.  Perhaps this is why I love traveling and making art with what I find around me.  Given fewer choices, I fuss less.  I long for a simpler life, yet seem unable to break the rules I set for myself long ago.

My newest fantasy is to stage a huge garage sale and to sell off jewelry, clothes, excess art objects stowed under beds and in closets and even, I admit, behind a painting in my seldom-used fireplace. Then I could stow the rest of my personal objects in my studio and take off for a year, living simply from a suitcase with a few clothes and a few tools and art supplies and my computer.

Where would I go and in these new places, would it be easier to break the rules, to stay simple and to concentrate on what is most important?  I’ve actually done this five times in my life, and every time I’ve ended up filling my life up fuller:  more things, more obligations, more expectations of doing it all.  Will I ever accomplish my goal of breaking these rules or will it have to be that final move that accomplishes what I’ve never managed to maintain in life–taking away all my distractions, until there remains only me?  And then, inevitably, taking away even me.

The Prompt: Breaking the Rules–Think about the last time you broke a rule (a big one, not just ripping the tags off your pillows). Were you burned, or did things turn out for the best?

 

Offers

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Offers

When he asked me to marry him
and when we had to bury him–
these times inevitably set
wherein we find that we must let
nature have its way with us.
It does no good to rant and fuss.
Life’s made to reward, then abuse.
Its vagaries we can’t refuse.

All is part and parcel to
the next thing that we’re meant to do.
Good comes from bad and bad from good.
Birth, courtship, marriage, parenthood
fill our lives in marching order,
but every joy must have its border.
Birth leads to death. Love’s often lost.
To release life’s pleasures is the cost

of having and enjoying them.
Coal under pressure becomes a gem.
Remembering this must get you through
the next trial that’s set up for you.
Every day’s  an offer  you can’t refuse–
another pleasure to gain, then lose.
Life’s losses are also its seeds.
We lose our wants to gain our needs.

The Prompt: Set the timer for ten minutes and then tell us about an offer you couldn’t refuse.