Today I am 69 years old. I am glad to be here. I celebrate my ongoing life with the arrival of the Blue Moon in acrostic form even as it approaches zenith as I write.
blue moon
backlit trio on the brim
lifted yond the con & pro
unseen force I G N I T E S and Lo
extra luminescent: L i m n
poe boy sandwich
we poets do have a proclivity
to suffer excesses insightfully
it may be a high sensitivity
that brings us to brinks so benightedly
and teetering so on a precipice
delivers such singular ecstasies
and tasting e’en hellish delights and bliss
gives us the incentive to wrest and seize
my devil is action/risk/taking chances
another’s is wine and another’s is shopping
transportative realms which a vice enhances
all keep purgatorial legions hopping
our patron saints are edgar allan poe
and e st v millay; a way we go…
the umlauted sky
evoked by a photograph by Sharon Suzuki-Martinez
two birds make the smallest formation.
abreast, small against huge tapioca-patterned clouds,
they add to the sky an umlaut,
a diacritical mark that makes all the difference
in heaven.
when we form an alliance
with a friend or a partner
or helpful neighbor or determined sweetheart
or any permutation thereof,
we umlaut the horizon
or the path or purpose
we are trying to acquire,
and though at times it makes more sense
to be a dot/beauty mark/vertex
than half an umlaut
or semicolon or colon,
teamed journeys
against a daunting sky
or looming thicket
are force multipliers
of the story
and its outcome.
don’t you love an umlaut
celebrating an anniversäry?
Fresh out of the kiln, here’s one of my more successful cut-lidded forms. The unglazed underside shows a charcoal-black clay body. Heat and gravity pulled the glaze down below the join, making for a delightful contrast. There might be a teapot in the future with this clay, glaze, and cut-lid approach.
chunks in the salad
here is latelife in miniature. / coffee cup, coffee, / salad vessel and salad / are all as new as this year. // thanks to a career change / a prep cook’s sensibility / put the grater aside / and used a food chopper and a ten-count chop / on the carrots / to ensure there would be chunks / in the salad / and not the mundane confetti / that is the norm. also, / organic blue agave sweetener stood in for splenda / and the raisin-to-carrot ratio / was upped approximately 20%. // it was a quiet, spectacular treat, / drinking sumatran-blend coffee / and eating a poshish salad / from vessels made recently / by the prepcook-poet-potter-bonvivant. // life changes us when we change / our lives.
As I was walking toward Harkins Theatres at ChrisTown Spectrum Mall, a friendly voice said, “Hi! How are you doing?” It belonged to this lady, sitting next to this car. She is Jen, and she is one of the people who pick up loose trash that lazy people couldn’t be bothered to throw away in appropriate receptacles. “It’s not the homeless,” she says. “Homeless people pick up after themselves.”
I held up my plastic bag, full of wrappers that held the snacks and lemonade I bought at Wal-Mart, which opens before the rest of the mall does. “Wal-Mart trash!” said I, referring both to the stuff in the bag, and people like me who shop at Wal-Mart.
Jen had a lot to say about how the homeless are mistreated, “basically being shooed around” by the police and other authority figureheads. I told her the sad story of Adam Vespoli, who had been shooed off a freeway underpass, then off a Valley Metro bus, and then, tragically, into an early demise by the City of Phoenix Police Department. (See my blog post “Five Stars for One of Them Was Mine by Susan Vespoli” for more details.) Her face went sad. She understood the injustice, and the way homeless people are vastly misunderstood, neglected, and abused.
“I talked to a Lyft driver about homelessness. HE told me ‘homelessness is a choice.’ Made me mad. He didn’t get any tip from me!” Jen also talked to one of the ChrisTown security guards, a new hire who seemed to think that the homeless were part of the trash-mess. “I set her straight on that. Part of my job is educating people.”
I thanked Jen for giving back to the community, raising the quality of local lives and helping make our community more civilized. I told her I’d make a blog post of our conversation, in hopes that it would educate more people about the plight of the homeless. Lastly, I took a picture of her and her company car, thanked her for a wonderful conversation, and wished her well.
Friends, if you are a Valley resident who wants to similarly contribute to Civilization, Jen’s company is hiring. See the number on the side of her car!
(First published in the Facebook group Poets All Call on July 18, 2023)
reshuffle
any card
discarded
makes the deck
defective.
even the three of cluster
and the seven of love
may fill a sequence
or buttress a structure.
now if you think
you have a bad hand
because your foot of jewels
or your prince of stems
tingles with numbness now,
nay. the tingling is your informant
of valuable intel. you now know
the game is changing
and if you dig deeper
you discern that cards the world over
may be added to your deck
if you but claim them
and make them your own.
there are more than four suits
to pursue, higher numbers than thirteen
in the sequence.
try the bus of possibility
or the bus of tranquility
or the hot tea of bloom
or the wildebeest (lighthearted
but no joker).
searches are easy now.
wish well.
this joker wishes you
the four of fulfillment.
One with Clay, Image and Text 