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Tag Archives: mortality

goner

May 31, 2025
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with bones that crepitate and ache

with flesh of crepe and fissures

it may be time to ponder and make

my peace with Fategirl’s scissors

it may be time to tally and settle

my modest life’s affairs

let not that last-plucked calendar-petal

send me off unawares

.

the wind’s no longer bracing

the birdsong does not cheer

the passing hours are racing

the cliffedge draws so near

so out go final messages

forgiveness of all debtors

eradicating vestiges

of jealousy of betters

.

the deathbed’s warm and cozy

and ringed with weeping friends

the media are nosy

and love to mark our ends…

so

fuck it!! time to rally;

throw off the bedclothes! RISE!!

EMERGE from shadowed valley–

it’s Party Time, you guys!!!!

interlude in unreal time

October 5, 2024
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i sit in my underwear and planetary society t-shirt/waiting for my heart to stop signaling/that something is going on in there

this is nothing new/when my brother was still alive more than six years ago/i felt something like this/and reported the feeling in a facebook post/and my classmate jeff/said get to e r that’s the widowmaker/i felt that when i had my heart attack

and my poet friend julie/said where are you i will drive you to the hospital

and so i called brian my brother now deceased/and he drove me to the e r/and they fast-tracked me into a little room/iv’d me up/got an ecg going

and not much later i was on my way home ecg reading normal bp ok cardiologist recommending a ct with contrast and wrote a script and an appointment was made

insurance would not approve that/instead greenlit a nuclear stress test/with result ‘normal’ because heart perfusion ‘normal range’

so in the several times/in the intervening years/i have like now just sat quietly and waited/for the signals to fade to quiet

and now the room is getting dark and no more heartjolting/and it’s first friday and a lot of stuff is going on/and i have missed the poetry event in tempe/missed the shabbat with my friend nadia and her family/but I can still catch the tail end of my sculptor and teacher friend sue’s solo show opening

time to put my pants on

life is fleeting precious and wonderful

mixing signal/love echo/bul[] shi[]

June 9, 2019
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Isn’t it frustrating to get part of a message, and have the rest of the message be forever beyond your reach? But that is, truly, Life, for all but the omniscient. Our simian heritage gives us a busybody’s curiosity; biological and physical constraints give us opaque horizons, signal noise, the need for sleep and other homeostatic housekeeping, and the tragicomedy of a finite lifespan.

This page is at least as frustrating for me as it is for you, O Viewer. So much is beyond my talent-reach, and I seem always to be short on time. But if it helps, I only wrote the last line of “Mixing Signal,” which is “Got Me? O well,” and other than telling you that it is a persona poem with a Yahwehesque God as the persona, you are free to either write the rest yourself, synopsis it without regard to meter or rhyme, or treat it as merely a visual element.

Similar goes for “Bul[]  Shi[]” though much more of the poem is visible. It is told from the point of view of a naysayer, and is an answer to “love echo” in the form of a sort of antiecho.

Bul[] Shi[]

Bombastitude has made a mess
Upyoursism oppresses flesh
Lamed intellect reverbs ennui
[.][…..] [……..] formed [..] Model [.]

Mystery fans, you now have all the clues you need to make some sense out of the last line. I don’t think anyone on Earth would be able to discern what the last line is, exactly, but the facts that Model is capitalized, and the rhyme-meter scheme revealed by the first two lines dictate that the last line be at minimum a near-rhyme of “ennui,” get you more than halfway there.

love echo

let those with baffled vision see
oppression plain as ABC
victorious are those who ooh
enlightenment’s a Bill & Coo

doom mete mood meet doom

June 7, 2019
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Every day is an opportunity to wallow in the depressive miasma of guaranteed mortality. Some people seek such opportunities, some flee from them in such denial as “50 is the new 30,” and some get an unignorable knocking at the door.

DOOM METE MOOD

Doubt is such a Microcosm
Onus an Embarcadero
Otherwise a Tarantino
Might send messages Encrypted

mood meet doom

metabolism maladjusted
obsolescence wrecks a bed. o
one2three the dire days come. o
detriment is zero-sum

On the other hand, says the Mortality Denier, EVERY DAY is also an opportunity to experience the Joy of a Lifetime. Please, Friends, use kindness to seek such joy.

Putting Out My Shingle

March 31, 2019
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Today I made some business cards. I made only eight, because there were horrible consequences to not manually feeding the label stock into the printer. The printer decided to teach me a lesson by mangling three pages of stock and leaving variously-jammed, hard-to-remove stock-sections hither and yon. Somehow some printing ended up occurring on that green-feltish roller thing inside the printer.

So I spent much of an hour opening front and back and top and drawer pulling out little accordions and rectangles and origamis of stiff paper. I THINK it is all out but I’ve had enough for one day and will do no more printing.

But pictured here is one intact card and two recent ceramic creations. This is a baby step toward the goal of monetizing my fine-arts efforts to the point of being able to fully retire from day-jobbing. Not that I don’t love my day job. It is just that I have three lifetimes-worth of important things to make, and only at most twenty years to make them.

Why twenty? Well, I’m sixty-four right now. My mother is a bit less than twenty years older than I am, and though she is still able to enjoy life, her memory and other faculties have declined sharply in the last couple of years, and my DNA is half her. The other half came from my father, who left us via myocardial infarction on January 5, 1983, at the tragically-premature age of 49.

So, Friends, my meter’s running.  If you’d like an original creation of mine at an astonishingly reasonable price, please shoot me an e-mail using my onewithclay@hotmail.com address. Include the amount you are willing to spend, and a headshot and personal philosophy if what you want is a custom portrait. No job too big, nor small!

the man in the shower returns

April 13, 2016
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Some time ago I wrote “the man in the shower is dying.” While I was taking a shower this afternoon, I thought of more to say, including a punchline that makes any further “man in the shower” sequels unnecessary . . .

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the man in the shower returns

the man in the shower returns to his musing/obsession with dying and willful confusing;/he thinks as he’d done on that long-ago day/of the final release from the vertical fray.

then comes odd contentment, erasure of glower/as the spray hits his head in a shower sub-shower/and he pushes the knob, puts the soap on the shelf/–thinks “at least when I’m dead I’ll get over myself.”

The Nobility of the Napkin Folder

April 27, 2013
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In 1977 I did a paper for my Human Factors in Engineering class; its title was “Work’s End.” In it I predicted that, given the advent of industrial robots and the mundanity and ignobility of conventional blue-collar toil, manual labor and “work” in the conventional sense would not last the century. The instructor, University of Arizona professor Russell Ferrell, annotated the B grade he gave my paper with his impression that though my premise was interesting, he didn’t think we’d get all the bugs out of “the Problem of Production” by my deadline.

And here it is, 2013, and part of my current job is folding napkins for an independent-living retirement community, and I am glad I was wrong. Of the many ways to render aid and comfort to the aged, hand-folding napkins to enhance their dining experience is seemingly trifling, but circumstantial evidence that they are special. I feel privileged to fold those hundred per night. They are a lovely purple, which also connotes the specialness of royalty. (I’ve color-enhanced my drawing to make it match that hue as close as I can.)

I imagine some readers smiling and thinking how pathetic this particular napkin-folder must be, trying to make such a drab endeavor out to be noble. I stand by my notion.

Here are the words to the acrostic, changing the spelling of UFO to its phonetic pronunciation to avoid confusion:

Nimble Jack, be deft–don’t goof
As e l u s i v e as an Oof-O
Perfect crease ain’t taught in school
Knappa: foe from Chester Gould
If i n e p t i t u d e ‘ s severe
Nab some cloth & dry a tear

NOTE: Chester Gould was the cartoonist who created Dick Tracy. He also created a multitude of bizarre characters–see the Warren Beatty movie Dick Tracy for samples. Here I’ve imagined Knappa, a villain who employs napkins in the binding of his kidnapping victims.

I hope the subtext of my page and these notes comes across, but I’m not proud: let me explicate. We are all headed for old age, if we’re lucky. We all need taking care of, and we get it, if we’re lucky. Part of being taken care of is life’s assurance that we deserve attention and dignity. The little touches of assurance may loom as large as the big ones, especially for people facing mortality.