entwined; drafts only

bustle, can mislead as a hustle.
then more 
run with serendipity
and a generosity whose capacity 
expands with age

~ May 2015

My town has them all;
the buffoon, the merry men,
a king, emperor, czar and godfathers 
both old and new school, mannered.

suburban culture, stories awash
emergence
to navigate a must at one's peril 
if it is to become home.

~July 2015

We do not have to live our lives forever defined by the damaging things that have happened to us.

25 cents leads to $25 and musing ....A search for insights...metaphors versus reality... Deconstruction as each voice represents unresolved self. Much Q and A among the voices in my head.

Q: If the world is Takers, Matchers, Givers (Give and Take - Adam Grant) ... how does this inform us as storytellers? A: Create empathy for the subject - Humanize the story.

Q: Will this demand a sane reaction to insane circumstances?
A: Depends, who is watching?

Q:What happened to you?
A: Need

~Aug 2015

Finding the sparkle

I tried to welcome the potential of a new habit today that included, inclusion. Several hours have past yet I remain uncertain.

I did find many turns of phrase connected me to a faint inner light that I have been keeping distant. The poet community appears welcoming, the sharing not totally self-absorbed and an occasional stanza or poem was pregnant with discovery. Most of the work did not feel final but I could sense the revision in some , the striving, the quest for fulfillment and the pleasure of a good line.

Revised a decade after inception with more exacting references, the poem I shared seemed to reach for, and touch, a more visceral place than the others.  As the person owned by the words, the emotions and flow remained tangible. This pleased me.

I am drawn to narrative poems. The mix of metaphor and story that concludes with a better sense of knowing; a hope for timeless results - results that will sparkle in one's toes, mind and soul like a night sky contending with cloud cover.

Will gathering with others incentivize me or push me further away from what I know somewhere within is important for my being; I remain uncertain.

Organically Incompetent

a thirsting
that is unaware of itself lets me limber onward
naturally unknowing, successfully so

before me,  returning often
navigating by osmosis thus not at the wheel
nor oar nor rudder

the water to nourish is abundant
yet i thirst
as if it were salty
my veins welcome the surge
my brain remembers the high
a casualty
i will beg, steal, curse the creator
organically natural

shutting down
failing the task at hand
not
drinking water

Connections: a measure of wellness

There are so many ways to create things responsively and beyond our comprehension that we often take too much for granted.  

The original picture was a captured on a walk to work via the local park. It was modified by an app on my mobile device called PicsArt within a few minutes of "poking" around the app. The variants are nearly unlimited; all could have looked interesting to someone. These particular outcome were a result of my curiosity and need for distraction and a team of talented people behind the construction of the app. I have yet to really do the research on the app, its functions and potential. As with many things this interaction leaves me in the shallows. I may never explore the app again nor get to know more of its workings. I got an immediate gratification leaving actual connections and next steps as TBD by ADHD because my world is full of scintillating and otherwise distractions. 

Many participate in this 'creative' process daily via this free photo editing and drawing apps and a unique social network of creatives. We humans are filling clouds with our distractions every minute. To what end? And how many knowingly using the tools we have access to. I can take pictures but I am not a photographer; I can edit but I an not an editor and so it goes in the shallows where many of us can do more without understanding.

The second re-creation includes a fly. This original pic taken moments after the first. I often find my self saying I wish I was a fly on wall for that discussion, decision or outcome so I cold understand it better. But do we ever really understand? I am not really an artist but today with an app I created art.

Future Tenses

Everyday poem ideas arise and then get lost in the busy. So today I quickly listed some titles that someday may find themselves a poem.

Ys (whys)

Tantrums and flies

Typos x 100 ugh

Untitled and other stray files

The company of women

I can see clearer now (and other delusions)

Quotable (or, when your bucket list has outcome dependencies and other future tenses)

Slight chance of rain

I press my brow deep into hide 
                 & seek, eyes closed.

The yesterdays      whisper

        s o m e thing  of

                                 me. Of then, before, when

whiffs of wet dog, damp diapers, moon light 

               slivers, cracks                   in clouds


ME-more me.

Who did you say was coming? 

Tomorrow           slight chance of rain. 
Take my umbrella. Jump the puddles. 

          Take care not to get 
                             washed away,   gone.
Rain 

        welcomes crickets & katydids
        sounds full, the possible   chance.
                              Any. You can
                              come back.

Tomorrow. Yes, I think I would like that.
                     Come.  See.  Me. 

                     slight chance            tears
                                             
puddles, will hold the reflection.


Note: Wallingford Public Library workshop lead by Lori Desanti. Prompt writing: use a memory.

Visit to self. It has been too long. Only you can answer why. Maybe it is the voices.

The morning was full of rain and I feel oddly liberated with an awkward bouncy buzz sensibility hovering almost audibly above my brow. "It's a new day, a new dawn." Both exhausted and energized, it was a feeling I absolutely knew I wanted to ride into a new place leaving the knotted mess of pulleys and chains behind and to let the voices name my knots would contaminate my mood so I attempt a refocus on my present.

Showered, sadly a notable accomplishment, dressed in simple attire with a few somewhat routinized chores done: the backyard cats had welcomed my late arrival, the newspapers gathered from the driveway yesterday's wet and today's bagged by the carrier and now a decision to not walk Jake as it was raining with intensity again.

It is Sunday Morning. I prepare to watch the CBS version with tea. My voices begin "Will you pick up the right television clicker? Will you enter the right code?"  Then in retort the judging voice declares; ”Living as you is a roll of dice in all things.” 

I push remote control buttons intending to enter 1-0-0-3. I land on 1-0-3. I stay. OWN is the channel bug. Oprah is speaking to Jean Houston. My frazzled brain tries to make connections. Words that have been in my ethos surface before me in competition with an annoying large fly: Heroes Journey, Joseph Campbell "Finding Your Bliss" 

My voices attempt to control my moment and my reactions: The classification begins putting boxes around all input: "new age" yet not so new as it is somewhere in my memories of the 1970s.

My gut says "listen". My brain says "listen with a pencil". Another disconnected voice in my head begins with the self-inquiry "Are you with this? Where do you stand?" 

The judging voice that constantly reminds me of my shallows declares: “You owned the books? Did you read them? You did watch the television series. It was like Cosmos, Connections and once the smartest man in TV Steven Allen's brilliant show "Meeting of the Minds". A PBS quick fixes of your past attempts to engage with a world larger than the one you inhabited. Campbell surfaced in the late eighties. You were a mom then. You knew you had dragons and a priest. You had large secrets. 

The fly is now dead and so is most of your memory.

Your take heed and pencil in hand you scribble in every direction several incomplete statements. Passion4Possible. The lure of common. Midwife of souls. Provocateur of possible. A barely legible catalog of your grasps of now for later. Insightful. Clever. Curious. No time to dissect merely transcribe.

You remember you too admire Eleanor Roosevelt. It is a feeling, not a knowing. They (Jean and Oprah) quote Eleanor. It is familiar. "Women are like teabags, put them in hot water and they just gets stronger." She will be quoted again "The future belongs to those who believe in their dream's".  She would be a great conversation but you know you could never hold up your end.

Jean Houston tells the story of being six and praying in a closet; after asking nuns "Did Ezekiel see the wheel when he was drunk?" You feel dumb not knowing of this wheel. A shallow voice says: "prophecy" but not with the knowing of google, a scholar or even a good catholic.

She describes leaving the closet and feeling a sense of awareness; not bliss. Oprah asked if this new awareness remains throughout her life? I lose track of the conversation, lost in my connected child-god-calling recurring memory.

I am now in a large Catholic Church. My son age five walks through masses of people in dark heavily wooden pews to the alter. He is radiant. He is already a master of the microphone. He takes it to his lips and says "I commit myself to priestly knowing". I see this scene often. Maybe it is out of guilt. His voice is so calm and precise and clear for a person of five. Maybe it is his phrase.  Not the priesthood; not the ways of priest but to knowing. Then I recoil. I never want to stay in that amplified memory too long. I shake it off. The dragons were already on his shoulders. Am I guilty? I wanted then to believe it was a blissful calling. What do I want now? A good story, a fairy tale ending? A son set free from those certain dragons and any others gathered in his journey.

A poem title comes to me "calling, heed it!". I try to catch up with the OWN conversation with its relevance to me. The next scribble '2nd Genesis" There is more to me than that. My voices, her words. O am uncertain. Scrambling in the murk of words "women of a certain age", which includes me, have an expanded inner capacity for radical empathy. Do I believe this? Do I know it? There is no longer an emphasis on how one is seen but rather a focus on service. 

The voices are now disagreeing with each other and the authenticity of both of these women each with means and public personas. I wander... are selfies taken phone in hand by grandmas any different than selfies of others? I think not.

There is a book to be sold, or read, The wizard of us? I am captivated by the question "What is your tornado?" The metaphorical allegory of the dis-empowered characters and red shoes again seems familiar. But I have not kept up with the television personality's conversation. 

I scribble another poem title "Either/Or". My A-D-D brain has me thinking about a recent family photo of my niece and her new son. It is captioned "Until you have a child you don't know all the places in your heart". It is all connected. I regroup and wonder if those parts of the heart get the reallocated when your child is grown or if they merely mature to be more embracing of others in the world?

I'm now writing around the edges of the notepad instead of going to the second sheet of paper. I have no idea why I do that. Maybe some latent fear of using too much paper.

The next note finding its edge is "Think Quotes: collect moments one by one." I write the quote "Be the change you wish to see in the world" - Gandhi. It is the cornerstone of my son's essay to a college in California that did not accept him. I have no quote of my own. My childhood dream was to become quotable, to someday have my words as a quote in Reader's Digest or in a fortune cookie or among the wrappers of chocolate or tea - a place of ordinary inspiration.

I'm not familiar with this channel 1-0-3. I don't know if "THINK" is some sort of a public service or arts project similar to "Before I die". There are people writing quotes on large yellow and blue post-it note cards and putting them on a very large wall. The wall spells out in robin's egg blue "think". The video captures what seems to be random ordinary people telling stories about why they picked their quotes. All the quotes were good and reasons for picking them even better. Right now I could not repeat one quote that I just heard. I such have a indescribable but palpable sense of the experience. It seemed uplifting and authentic and artsy. Experiential art.

During the TV ad, I clicked to the originally intended cable TV station: 1-0-0-3. I hear a story concluding. The topic is 'passionate kissing'. The the take-a-way is 'passionate kissing' burns 2 calories and eating a Hersey Kiss adds 22.2 calories. I am left flat. I do not know what this is intended to mean. Maybe the conclusion of this video story needed Act one. 

More ads. More clicks. One mistakenly on my smartphone. 

My attention is drawn back by the Super Soul Sunday OWN show. In conversation I hear both women claim to pray daily. Oprah's prayer is simple: use me. They seem consumed with changing the universe, my universe is hyper-local. I can not remember when I last looked up to the stars but I do make sure NASA stories are redistributed as educational TV. What does that say about me? A loud voice wonders?

My smartphone beeps me to its attention. I seq-way is to mass killings and what does media do. My voices panic in escalation knotting me up again with a sense of uselessness and insufficent knowing. More to watch, read, see and try to remember. David Harris-Gershon and a Newswipe by Charlie Brooker. More scribbles: the commentator describing media's mishandling of crimes committed by those seeking fame: do not use images so pix-elated that it looks like reports from Lego convention. His words my reaction I do not know. I am nodding and can hear myself saying: I agree. The beast must be fed. Why? Media does enable terror and commercialism. The right thing is elusive as we write today's history. My bliss is now in an overcrowded closet. Opening the door will likely suffocate me. I can not answer simple questions: Your favorite quote, movie, book is?  I can not remember but somewhere inside me is a voice about notes that fails to follow the lines.

As I get on with my day: my shallows posit a question "Will you follow-up on either of these things? your personal spirituality journey or the role of media and the saturation of insanity in today's culture. 

This blog post is far from the poem that my morning wanted. 

I feel good about 'a better knowing' of 75 year old Jean Houston. The mystical question causing a news burst @1996 simply being "Who would you love to have a conversation with? And Hillary's logical answer: Eleanor Roosevelt hearkens back to Steve Allen. What I have come to understand is that Ms. Houston is about transformation not mysticism: the closest she is to a GURU is the embodiment of this caricatured phrase is her approach to life: Gee, yoU aRe yoU!  

In conclusion it was an informed, if not fruitful day. And, In three minutes it will be tomorrow.

Prompts: Poetry tells us what cannot be said

lost
more poems
than penned
near-claim
absent oneself

a poet.

for what of
if undocumented
be

effort-
less with words

PROMPTS

let them open
me,my self
If for no other
reason than
to be

~ adele

Trust & lying connection ...

Some days invoke Charlie (Papa):  
He drew very black & white lines which ultimately cost him relationships. Trust & lying were intricately entwined in his philosophy on life. Some rules he put before relationships. 

I am grateful knowing that when he died he trusted me. 

He had thought I broke his trust when we moved him from Florida to CT. He was certain that I had lied to him about some aspect of cleaning his place because he could not find a small bag of valuables after he was relocated. 
More than 5 years later he found that bag. It was a few days before he died. It included medical grade gold that was once his tooth filling. He became eager to turn these missing valuables into cash. I prioritized getting it done with him. The tooth gold yielded $70. 

I asked what he wanted to do with this windfall and he said "I want you to have it, to use it for you". Here is where my recall fails me. I probably said in a snarky tone "Sure Charlie, I will do something special, got any suggestions." I can recall driving thru town toward home but can not remember doing something special with the $70. 

Maybe it is more important that I remember what he said next "I am sorry that I thought you lied to me about carefully cleaning out the trailer, it was happening so fast." I do remember my two part response to that: Fast, that was Curt's doing. I was careful as I could be and I learned not to lie to you a very long time ago, Dad because I never wanted to lose you. I am so much like you that is impossible to do now, right." 

And he snarkily replied, 'sometime you are right.' We both smiled with the fullness of love.

88 ~

Maybe a stretch, horizon, or illusion
My head no longer calculates without aid, the years implied, 27 btw, at this gestational arc of an idea

When she said it, I too wanted to own it. Before 
that moment 
I was busily hapless or hopelessly busy, yet inert.

This suddenly seemed infinitely better.
Ah, to what end the will.

I swear I posted at least once in 2015 .... but nothing is here.

I have always worked in CT. Since 1969 the Connecticut minimum wage rate automatically increased to 1/2 of 1 percent above the rate set in the
Fair Labor Standards Act when the federal minimum wage rate became equal or higher than the State minimum; so I guess I was fortunate to live in CT. In 1969 the Federal minimum non-farm wage was $1.60 an hour; it is now $9.10.

So far I have worked 46 years but not always for pay. I started working at 14; summers in the Tobacco Farm Industry. I do not remember working less than 24 hours a week since age 16. It was the max I could manage while in school. In various iterations of work, family and school the weeks were long. At age 50 I added school back to the balancing act to catch up with the world my kids experienced each day; it was a technology related degree. It is not second nature but it is part of what I do every day working in my community.

How much one gets paid does not lessen the work, eliminate the deadlines, nor accountability; in fact, you really need to believe in it or need it very badly to do it under such circumstances.

You need 35 good years for working to work for you to get the full benefit of Social Security. I did nearly 2 years as a VISTA volunteer for a stipend in 1978-79. For the past four years my work has been uncompensated; my average even with all the hustle and promotions will not be the best but I decided to stop being corporate anyway.

There are times in life when work should come with hustle and time it should come with meaning.

Today however there is an additional complexity:  

I need to ask myself; does enabling others to forgo hustle or the challenges of working more than 24 hours - make me stupid or just used.