when you learn/you become/but before you get good at what you are learning to do/you are so bad it is embarrassing
the embarrassment makes some give up
the stubborn keep at it/embarrassments are less frequent/and begin to be interleaved/with successes
and some who are stubborn but not passionate/will give up at that point/with a self-congratulatory “mission accomplished”/and an urge to shift focus
the passionate keep at it/and pile up experience/and one fine day/there is a “beyond their wildest dreams” moment
they have done something that rewards/their day after week after month after season efforts/something worthy of peer recognition/worthy of celebration/worthy of something beyond congratulation
the rest of my life will be but a blink of Eternity’s five-lobed eye/yet i fritter away a hefty chunk of my remaining time/playing games offered me by this thrice-curst “smartphone”
one game whose initials do not stand for World Wrestling Federation/wants my money/so they throw annoying ads at me/and then they offer me a deal of 30-day Ad Free for $$4.99
isn’t that extortion, O Friends With Words?
many of the ads are for games/and one features a crosseyed king who is always imprisoned and threatened with crushing/by stones or ball bearings or other relentless stuff/and the more primary-color blocks you blast away by positional alignment/the more room the falling deathmass has to go/thus helping you save the king
there’s another one you can tell was designed by the same team/involving a large but cute bear imperiled by rising piranha-infested water/and your efforts MIGHT drain enough water away/before his fate is sealed with a sploosh
and yet another involving a young betty&veronica cute girl picking her way to safety whilst death creeps in from stage right
so i’m guessing the game-makers are targeting/those poor saps psychologists have labeled as “rescuers”
and my inference is that these death-by-inundation scenarios are intended to push those thalamic 🧠buttons and make the payoff of saving the king or the bear or the girl immediately precede an ad paid for by a charity or an insurance company
but Cripes on a Crutch the REAL inundation/is with all of these distractions benign/or malign
and more and more when i finally exit the Scrabblesque game i have been inveigled to play
you are seven years old/you play jumprope at recess with girls/and today the teacher on duty pulls you away/and tells you there is something terribly wrong with you/and you cry
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you are twenty-one years old/one of the most intelligent and beautiful young women in the Universe is your sweetheart/and you don’t appreciate her/till she isn’t your sweetheart any more
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you are thirty-five years old/your child’s head is crowning and you can see hair/and the doctor comes in and shoulders you out of the way/and at eight fifty-seven pm he says “it’s a girl!”
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you are forty-nine years old/and your wife suggests you might “discreetly date” other women/ and caps the lopsided discussion with “just don’t make a fool out of me”
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it is the weekend of your fifty-eighth birthday/and you are in a tent on a campsite with the woman you love/and it has been intermittently raining/and she tells you something that breaks your heart
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you are sixty years old/and you live in one of the most beautifully landscaped places on Earth/and you are walking outside in the dark/and thanks to the light pollution laws there are an unbelievable number of stars in the night sky
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you are today years old/midway through a poem/speculating about the future/and letting your mind wander
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you are a hundred and fifteen years old/looking in the mirror after your fourth rejuvenation/flexing the taut muscles of your forearms/and a disembodied voice says “what kind of day would you like–regular, or frisky?”/and you reply that you want to be with a friend/and soon you and gillian are on your way to laos/to visit and play games with her kids
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you are eight thousand, four hundred and thirty-one years old/and your spark inhabits the body of an orangutan/and you use your gangly arms to swing through trees in the tangy, humid jungle, and you intend to exercise to exhaustion and then have a boy-orangutan have his way with you/so that you will add another unique experience to your extensive collection
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you are twenty billion years old, more or less/and Old Sol has engulfed the Earth in red swollen expansion/and you and a cluster of like minds/are “dancing” on Europa/the while participating in a lively symposium/loosely themed “What NOW?”
0
the universe has wound down/the stuff of it has cooled to just above absolute zero/and you use your remaining crumb of hoarded energy/to do a rewind of your trillion-year lifetime/kissing lovers hello/apologizing for all of your misdeeds/revelling in the lush loving episodes of yore/with a certain grand detachment/until you face the seven-year-old boy you used to be
you tell him with your last bit of consciousness/that playing jumprope with the girls in defiance of that nasty teacher was your crowning achievement/and both of your ghosts smile
as you fade into the cosmic fuzz of the mysterious Beyond
little shrimp and big sharks have a deal/wherein the shrimp snack/on the shreds of flesh after the shark has had a feed/so the shrimp are in effect/organic dental floss
i once feared dental floss/thinking my gum-flesh delicate/not realizing that the scrubbing the floss enables/served to make the gum habitat more healthy/the gums better able to adhere to the clean enamel/and that bleeding i feared/less likely to happen
so after I take my morning medication/I floss with thorough vigor
but as a vestige of my old fear/before I start/i look myself in the eye in the bathroom vanity mirror/and solemnly intone “be careful”
and today after I was done i said to the floss/”thank you little shrimp”
i know it’s silly but it helps my day
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Note: it was my fine friend Bernard Schober, known as The Klute and beloved by many, and now–alas!!–deceased, who first told me about the symbiotic relationship between sharks and shrimp. Please see my post “How ‘Bout Them Sharks?” for more about Bernard, and sharks, and our collaboration.
This evening, the third Sunday of the month, Esso Coffeehouse was the venue for its monthly Open Mic poetry event, hosted by my friend Russ Kazmierczak. I intended to participate as usual, and arrived early to ensure a good seat, but I was unsure what I ought to select for reading.
Then proprietor Sharon K stopped by my table to say hello, and asked me what I’d been up to, and I mentioned the Valentines I’d written this week, the latest one being a acrostic of my co-worker Kendra. (See my post of Valentine’s Day, February 14th.) Since I have the highest regard for Sharon, I decided to demonstrate that regard with an impromptu belated Valentine for her, thus:
S is for Solo Proprietorship
H is for Heaven in every sip
A is the Ambience we love so much
R is for Roasting and Revels and such
O is for OMG!! Esso’s The Bomb!
N is for Nice, thanks to Sharon’s aplomb
–Wellllll, ALMOST thus. My memory is fuzzy as far as exact words go. But the spirit and content are the same.
Here is a selfie of Sharon and me, taken after the event:
With five minutes to go before Open Mic started, I asked the lovely Julia F if I could have a go at doing her name too. She said, with just a slight frisson of dubiety, “Sure, have at it.” And just before “curtain time” I showed her the first (only) draft:
J is for Jaunty and stylish with flair
U is Undaunted — a fierce heart beats there
L is for Lissome, quite svelte & so slender
I is Iconoclast, other-road wender
A is Alluring, whatever your gender
She really is Alluring. See for yourself:
Soon it was my turn at the microphone. I wished everyone a belated Happy Valentine’s Day and told of the Valentines I wrote for the occasion, reciting Kendra’s and Julia’s. Then I looked across at the smiling face of novelist Roxanne Doty and said “You know, a real challenge would be to do one with an X in their name.” Then I did something akin to this:
R is Resplendent — a wildflower blossom
O is for Outings with Owl or Opossum
X is a Xeriscape for your enjoyment
A Academia — tenured employment
N is for Nature and what it has brought her
N is for Novelist Out Stealing Water
E is for Excellent Mother Earth’s Daughter
Some polite applause began, but I stepped on it with “Wait, there’s more!”
D is for Destiny: Best-Seller List
O is for Oscar, Best Screenplay: “RESIST!”
T is for Thankful this poem’s almost done
Y is for Youthful — eternally young
And here is evidence supporting that last line:
The featured poet of the event, David C, is an award-winning superstar of published poetry, and wowed the audience with eco-friendly journeys delivered with a rich Manchester-accented voice. His denunciation of Kit Carson and his clear-cutting of Arizona peach trees was particularly vivid.
After the event I bought one of David’s books, and he gave my copy this generous inscription: “Fellow spirit, fellow wordsmith, all the best. David C”
And Roxanne had this droll comment afterward about Academia: “Annihilating anything that is original.” Made me glad to have dodged the career-in-academia bullet. 🙂
the bed is spring mix washed and washed and washed
the glop is thousand island dressing mossed
the eggs are chef’s-knife-sliced and when they’re noshed
thus stratified it gratifies, untossed.
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Note: This is last night’s salad, and my record of avoiding culinary disaster by leaving the salad untossed, which would have disunited yolks and eggs and mushified the yolks. Plus, aren’t the sliced eggs pretty? They look like a patch of flowers.
It is my good fortune to see this lovely woman almost every day. She slices turkey and ham, and I slice tomatoes, and we work across from each other in a gigantic kitchen, preparing foodstuffs for airport restaurants.
Her name is Kendra, and somehow it has become part of our workday to say “It’s good to see you” to each other, first chance we get. Yesterday there was more, though. I told her that for Valentine’s Day I was offering custom Valentine poems to any of my female Facebook friends who wanted one. Kendra smiled and suggested that I do one for her.
So yesterday I did. Here’s what she pulled out of the envelope on her break today:
Inside is a custom-made Valentine poem:
K is for Keeping your calm in the storm
E is your Eyes so dark-chocolatey warm
N is for Numinous–magical, bright
D is Delightful, a so-welcome sight
R is your Rich Voice of velvet and sun
A is Adorable–you’re #1!!!
And, you know, Friends, she does, they are, she is, she is, it is, and she is. This is one of the easiest Acrostics I have ever written. The words just leaped out as I thought of my friendly, consummately professional, drop-dead-gorgeous co-worker, of whom I am quite fond.
the engineer does not think of her coffee/as “hot”/but rather “cooling”/and not as “coffee”/but as a mixture of water/and ground bean byproduct/and 3ml of dairy extract somewhat denser than whole milk/and an unmeasured squirt of blue agave syrup/with a specific gravity greater than the rest of the mix/that has a certain insolubility such/that her drink will become sweeter with successive swallows/which is exquisite
her bed partner/lacking the background that includes terms like “threshold limits”/and “asymptotic approach”/and “under the metallurgical dome”/and “thevenin equivalent circuit”/and “chi-squared smoothing function”/enjoys HER hot coffee in a different way
hers is a magic vitalizing elixir/an alignment of planets and constellations/yum
the partners are good together/in a way not easily described in words
i joined the national workforce at the age of fifteen/and so have paid into social security for more than fifty years
i have worked almost a year for the u s postal service, america’s largest employer
i worked an aggregate nine years for three different healthcare systems, wrangling spreadsheets
i have worked at the family business my grandmother’s husband started/and later for my stepbrother/and later yet for my stepfather
i have been a warehouseman and a substitute teacher and a graphics designer and a data processor and a front desk night clerk and an office manager and a restaurant host/cashier and an administrative vice president
lately I’ve been a prep cook mostly slicing tomatoes and onions and portioning refried beans
consequently my dreams sometimes take hold/in a workplace setting/and last night was one such
in the dream i had come back to work after a leave of absence/and was told to look around
and my old and presumably reinstated office space/was engulfed in stuffed file folders/and the desktop computer i had used was gone
and a strange lady nearby saw my aghast expression/and said “don’t worry, this is temporary”
then a bigshot-looking blustery guy commanded me to find him a round office ASAP
and I looked in vain upstairs and down
then a guy dressed for golf with a bronzed suntan peeked around a doorway and seeing me asked me how my GOLF GAME was and suggested that we blow this pop stand and go to meet the tee time he’d arranged so he could check out my GOLF GAME
and i knew suddenly that a) this guy was powerful b) if i had a good GOLF GAME i could write my own ticket c) the firm was flying false colors as far as company mission went d) my GOLF GAME would be as good as my dream made it–hey, e) this was a dream.
i shuffled out of bed and to the bathroom/to take care of an old man’s business/and saw i had a good hour before the alarm
so I tried to pick up on the dream where it left off/but of course that rarely happens
and I was never able to clean house/with that corrupt company, alas
the girl-dog next door is sweet nala/she has close-cropped strawgold hair/and light-milk-chocolate eyes/a pushed-in puggy face/a nose-wiping tongue/and on her short legs she has sidewalk-skittery clawpaws
and when my neighbor brings her out/and i am out there too/nala doesn’t know what to do/because she is so shy but also desperate for the love of every human being available/so she looks up at me with her pleading face/but backpedals when i extend a hand
when I walk away she strains to come after me/if i stand there long enough she jumps up/ putting her clawpaws just above my knee
and finally i get to scratch her under the collar/and her eyes almost roll up
and then i must go about my business/despite sweet nala’s eyes
One with Clay, Image and Text 