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It being Tuesday, I did my Title Tuesday feature for the Facebook group Poets All Call. This time round my fellow moderator Genevieve Lumbert offered three of her own titles as well:

The Great Falling Away
inertia
hope

My thanks to my lifelong friend. These titles helped me write some poetry that went beyond puzzle-solving and into exploration of matters of the heart.

Here is how I responded.

The Great Falling Away

A clumsy man heard surf
Felt love
Listened to a story about cowhide
Flung over a cliff
And kissed a woman soundly
And kissed a woman softly
And kissed an opportunity
Goodbye.

We don’t always fall down
Like Lucifer.
Sometimes we fall away
Like a vagabond
Or a brisk wind
That shifts direction.

Sometimes a man dies
With a private chamber of sound kisses
And tender sentiments
Still in him.

inertia

the clutter of a litterbug
a scattered realm of shame and love
a stutter step a tale of woe
of habits formed that won’t let go

the butter of another’s lust
unshuttered cluster’d stars unfussed
pull/cull the interstellar dust
and slowly come unwound

the mainspring of eternity
is neither wild nor full unfree
mere cutlery manipulating
flesh of roasts anticipating
guests to sink their teeth
and flee
or saunter through
infinity

hope

we are vertical
and we breathe.

so let us believe
life contains a goodness
our thirst to slake,
the warm embraces
we want to make,
the hikes and climbs and jousts
for whish we roustabouts roust,
the heldhands nightwhispered
plans d’evasions
we wish to conspiratorily make
and then unleash…

hope like a sprig of a sprouting bean
makes a fat man long to lean,
makes two journeys intersect
and lovelorn halves
at last
connect.


20160617_093115-1

This is my drawing table, a gift from my parents on a Christmas sometime in the early 70s. It has been in Arizona, in Glendale and Phoenix and Cottonwood and the Village of Oak Creek in Sedona, and it has also been in Las Vegas, Nevada. I almost gave it away to someone for no other reason than that he had his stuff on it. I almost threw it piece by piece into the dumpster by my last apartment, faced with the prospect of having to U-Haul it to my new place. (I have just moved out of one apartment and into another one.) I am SO GLAD that luck and good sense and friendship conspired to keep it mine.

The lamp vise-gripped to the right edge of the table was part of the Christmas gift, and it works like a dream still. The stool and the fatigue mat were gifts from my former sweetheart Denise, and my gratitude to her continues. The banjo to the left of the table was another gift from my parents, and I gave it away once, hoping it would be well used; alas, the guy I gave it to never used it, so I took it back. (Alas, to this day I cannot play it.) The painting on the right is a superb nature study of butterfly and reflection by my dear friend and Confidante, Gen L (or E, depending). Another gift, and I am so grateful to be so gifted, and so egomaniacal to suggest that that has a double meaning. (I will play the I’m Just Kidding, Folks card if asked.)

But a crucial gift that keeps the table mine is of time, elbow grease, and the use of a magic red Pick-Em-Up Truck from my TRULY gifted friend, Russ Kazmierczak, Jr., creator of AMAZING ARIZONA COMICS. Russ and his truck moved my possessions entire from 35th Ave/Northern to 29th St/Indian School on two consecutive days. Russ offered me this help some weeks ago, when he found out I would be moving. When I took him up on it, he proved his rarity by cheerfully agreeing, showing up cheerfully on-time-or-early as agreed, co-muscling my stuff and Tetris-ing (his verb) it into the bed of the truck, and shlepping it to where it now belongs. Russ is a keeper, as his wonderful girlfriend Randi well knows. (And vice versa, as Russ well knows.)

So here’s to continuity: of Friendship, of Creativity, and of Love, of companions along the way past and present. Life is as good as we take it.

Image

Last week my friend Bob Kabchef created a feature called Maudlin Monday in the poet’s group we both are in, and I joked that I was working on a dual portrait of Maud Adams and Loretta Lynn for Maud/Lynn Monday, but it would take some time. This week my friend Genevieve Lumbert, another member of our group, reminded us: “POP CALL TO MAUDLIN MONDAY ARCADE.” (Arcade was Bob’s username in the now defunct seniors social site Eons, where we all met.) Spurred by Gen’s nudge, I did the above. Since the index card is a little beat up, it didn’t lay on the scanner flatly, and so I put a CD-R atop it, remembering that there’s a cool prismatic effect when you scan a disk.

Words:

Made their marks with smarts and toil
Anguished; languished; knew true joy
Upped their cred despite their men
Do let’s see them both again

The Shakespeare quote is apt for these two ladies, and for several of the ladies in our poet’s group Poets All Call, including its originator, Socorro Olsen, and Genevieve, and my Sweetheart, Denise.