7-31-2014

Thank You, Agent Nightingale

How many children live a better life
All because of the day you thought to
Put your ideas down on napkins? Amid strife,
Plenty of hurdles, you sought to
Yank from darkness' clutches the tough
Boy who lived. Live he still does
In the hearts of millions where such stuff
Revives, in a cycle sidecar, the spirits of those
True believers riding on disbelief's suspension.
However, when it comes down to it,
Dreaming aloud is not what you have done.
Architect of your own universe, to whit,
You crafted a tale to keep us awake,
J.K. Rowling, like the nightingale for the emperor's sake.

7-30-2014

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7-29-2014

What Gives?

Look at all the dissatisfaction
Or the reporting of it. Maybe
Versions of an object's refraction
Err on the side of what pays. See,
Some people are cynical and want
To make a fast buck on what turns
Heads on the highway. Let's be blunt.
Everyone is tempted by scenes on fancy urns
As a metaphor for paradise.
Nobody can live with it. Keats
Showed that with a near kiss (to be concise.)
Watch the world with less speed
Expectation and more understanding.
Resist the knee-jerk stare at Icarus's disastrous landing.

7-28-2014

Birth of Atonement
(For Julia and Mom)

Left alone to memories we may find
Ourselves the life of the party once more.
Victory in the darkness of what's behind
Everything. The mystery of withstanding horror.
The truth seems obscured like dark matter.
How it works we want to know and yet
Empathy might be the only window that sadder
Mercy will open. And the stings and nets
Are not badges, but more so like acupuncture's groove:
Needling us to the cure. And how I remember
Your words when the doctor applied liquid nitrogen to remove 
Warts on my feet (amid your squeezed hand's temblor)
At my question to you: "Mom, is my grip too much to surmount?"
Your smiled reply: "I have felt more pain than this on your account." 

7-27-2014

The Formula of Luck

Something there is about a pair of sevens.
Everyone gravitates toward the idea of it.
Victory of some sort, like the Nth value of Heaven.
Eternity on earth of the good kind. Love it
Now and love it later. The number of voyages
A pair of swans make perhaps. Favorite
Number of the lucky and unlucky. Coy mages
Dream up an incantation and savor it.
Seven brides for seven sisters promise
Epic cinema and delivers for some but not
Very many. Still stoicism without surprise  
Ensures the worst of whatever. What's that 
Next to the jackpot? The shadow the rainbow casts 
Is more than a distilled refresh of the past.

7-26-2014

Reasons to be Cheerful (Part Two)
Realizing you have become the fake you tried to make 
Except now you do something else instead of striving. 
Actually waking up at your own wake.   
Delighting in finding a penny for future giving. 
Truly understanding forgiveness is not salvation's prerequisite.
Hearing any song again for the first time. 
Ending a performance and enjoying the respite
Before the applause as a pure moment's rhyme.
Inferring the obvious when no one is watching.
Believing despite evidence to the contrary.
Listening to music composed by the deaf. Catching  
Each toss your father throws with nary
One thought of dropping the ball.
Koans. (Just because of their silent clang's sake.)

7-25-2014

Mystery Rapped in an Enigma

Some things bear repeating. For example,
Uninterrupted monosyllabic
Refrains by the sixties band: "The Trashmen"
For an eleven month old baby girl
In a onesie, whenever grandpa sings this,
No toy, no drink, no pacifier satisfies
Better. The joy of the simple sound
Is all it takes to send delight
Round the living room. Telling the 
Dancer from the dance? Who cares when
"Pa Pa Oom Mow Mow Pa Pa
Oom Mow Mow Mow" brings romping and
Pleasant playfulness. Why should we be so
Serious when all we need is family nonsense?

7-21-2014

Sound Reason

Many a time we sail through storms
Upon the wings of muse without knowing
So much as a word of the reason of forms
In the song. It just speaks to us. Flowing
Cadences and pulsing melodies.
Toe tapping, head nodding we move
Or sway carried completely as by a breeze
On a summer day. And our thoughts as seeds
Unleashed of stemmed  worries to
Real wonder and oneness. Nothing impedes
Escape, and no need to hurry to
A haven that surrounds. A Koan of sound.
Resonating piano strings refrain the satirists.
"So what if the usual scheme is off!" says the sitarist.

7-20-2014

Thank You Robert Krulwich

Upon Hearing What B Flat Does to Alligators

It circles, circles in my brain

Like a black bird hovering oe'r Bahrain.

When suddenly I hear a voice pull me back

From chaos's choice by speaking of the sound effect

B-flat evokes in swampy tracts

Where tubas generally show no disrespect.

On the radio I hear a voice like crystal--

Plain and clear--say b-flat plus tuba equals bellow

When witnessed by an alligator. No pistol

Could irk a creature more in mire mellow.
I laugh until an image glints: in Jericho a sand grain

Remembers the day it heard Joshua's band play.

Back in Bahrain the 'copters tumble again.

And I think: I'll learn the tuba and march to D.C. someday.

7-19-2014

Birthday Present

Curiosity built the catalog of my dreams.
Rightly, my mom and dad sensed this.
Yearly they would bring me gifts 
Sure to keep me occupied. Plastic beams
To build scaled skyscrapers, buildings
And such. But not 'til the year mom brought
Live radio into my ken, and I got
Radio signals through an earpiece: "Wild Thing"
And other songs from WAKR
Did i launch a lifelong love for waves
In the air i could not see but still have
Operatic sensations surround me in a car,
Or, in this case, the basement where i found,
Next to the wall, a pipe to use as a ground. 

7-18-2014

Wanted: undeveloped real estate

Perhaps the best summer of my childhood
I spent in a vacant lot not far from my home.
Children would go where the blueberry bush stood.
Kindling sticks chosen for first at-bats. Some
Used fingers behind backs. Closest guess
Picked first among the players on hand.
Bat was usually Jimmy's or Randy's. Lest
Another had a recent birthday and
So brought a new bat. Gloves were shared.
End of an inning saw gloves flying with "heads up" shouts
But first a short stop at the blueberry bush where
A ripe crop fed us for the next three outs.
Looking up on Google maps now the fast 
Line drive that winds me: the lot is now the past.

7-17-2014

Wieder Gefunden

O Goethe, your mercy resounds in that short verse.

Think how many trees have been saved,

How many lives inspired to reverse

Errors of educating with the paved 

Reading rituals that kill thought 

Through letting the soil of lacking

Resolve infiltrate youth by ideas overwrought.

Enough of exaggeration and attacking

Elementary excitement with dead drills. 

Find a new place that wakes in seedling minds

Ooohs and ahhs that stretch and fill

Under the canopied sky and grow organic lines

Not by Dick and Jane, nor tired children's rhymes.

Deed is the word that makes up for lost times.

7-16-2014

Fourteen Reasons to be Cheerful

Maya Angelou instead of Mayan resets.
Yelling moves the mob, but silence, the soul.
In jail you get handcuffs, at work you get headsets.
Now you can search "forever" instantly. Goal!
Dow Jones means Las Vegas for the rest of us.
Even computer graphic artists would rather use sidewalk chalk.
Prevailing winds and passing fads are synonymous.
Expectation will always give us something to mock.
National border enthusiasts still have a chance to read "Mending Wall."
Dahl's invention of  "Whizzpopping." 
Eternity and now are not exclusively mutual.
Nieces make better thank you cards than what you can get shopping.
Canadians still like us despite our government.
Everyone looks sillier the more somber they are bent.

7-15-2014

The Wright Formula (L=kSV²C_L)

Do you suppose the brothers laughed and
Enjoyed the formula's emergence as much as when their
Father brought home, in 1878,  the toy with the rubber band?
You know, the one with the propeller? Were
Imaginations wound so tight, they released to winds near
Nags Head, many a kite to work out the details.
Go fly one. Bet they heard that a lot. Pier
Gliding businesses were not even dreamed when rails
Ran the country's expansion. And yet over and over
Ascended the brothers, with many a crash to prove
Victory is about persistence. For the plover?
Is that what others thought. While they strove
To discover how wings' angles change. Suddenly I'm lifted by
Your solar bulb that made my dreamed lightship drift by.

7-14-2014

"...Flying. What owl does."

His mom's soft voice carried him to the woods
Every five-year old loves for a visit with imagined
Friends as they frolicked or stood
Fretting in the dark, awaiting the serpentine
Adversary to steal the honey. Swaddled
Loosely in covers, knees to chest,
Under the spell of a bear addled,
Mostly happy and leaving the best
Part of worry to his piglet friend
Who taught how, enlarged, a mind
Often magnifies and mulls and tends,
Over and over, to seek and find
Zeal in the running possibility: 
Landing in a trap or defying gravity.

7-13-2014

The welcomeness of thank you

Alot depends on a note sent from the heart.
Thanking for a cat's cradle how-to book
Has a splendor all its own and imparts 
A sense of art appreciation. Just look: 
Newly illustrated with puppy dog creation! 
Kaleidoscopic crayons in frenzied cat-scratch
Yield smiles that radiate a sensation 
Of all is well and all will be well. Catch
Us in a moment off-guard and still
Hold us captives of cute. Willingly
Everyone succumbs to naive mastery of will.
Art is not artifice when inspired so singly.
Let's think how best to celebrate skill of hand:
Surely by miraculous tension tween cat and dog spanned. 

7-12-2014

Float on

God speaks and we belong to the world of words
As bees distributing meaning unaware of
The extent to which we are fruit ninjas with swords
High held and focused on the nectar's love.
Even though we feel the solitude of daily
Rituals, the work we do in this world
Yells while we remain silent. And we gaily
Envelope our tasks and send out hurled
Planets entirely unknown to us. That's for the best,
Or else we might think the words were ours.
Letting God have what little praise we can invest
Looses us of pride's temptation and pours
Enthusiastically: "Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee."
New nectar is better than punch drunk memory.

7-11-2014

End, The

My shopping cart must have startled the girl
Of perhaps 5 years when she attempted to enter
The out door at the store. Or maybe the curl
In my lips as i said: "Magic!" and watched the centers
Of her wide eyes. Her mother's hand pulled hers gently,
Not speaking, but smiling at me and leading to the next door.
So i pondered that exchange, wondering why i had mentally
Excepted the truth of what i had said, thinking  logic vectors
Now about what causes electronic doors to open and close.
Silly really, since i do not truly know how they work.
Inklings of notions and accepted explanations and Just so's:
That's the best i could do if i had to take a test on the torque
Involved in turning a knob, if it came to push, pull, or shove.
Velocity diagrams vs guidance of the one who shows love.

7-10-2014

Through the dark glassly

We seek to sense where the soul is surfacing.
Hard rains and easy breezes (notwithstanding
Errors in judgment) ripple the water. Meanwhile racing  
River skaters adjust silently and ceaselessly. The banding 
Elegantly startles clarity of the reflection and we look up
Imagining we see the original, not the copy, and are disappointed
Somehow that we are no longer in the picture. Shook up,
We wait for stillness in the surfaces once disjointed
And now we see ourselves again in the clouds
Living as forms not our own but as a whale or
Dolphin or some other porpoise. What we suppose shrouds,
On a lazy summer day, the eye hiding the truth for our valor
And kneeling we look down, for Eros' echo's sake and kiss the glass
Til we are Narcissus's Psyche once again, and make our wakeful splash. 

7-9-2014

Papa Grump's Confetti Shrimp Boat Salad

Whatever you do, do it with love in your heart
or
The unwritten part of the recipe

This is for guys only (or at least most that I know.)
When you make a dish for your lover there's
a lot unsaid. The instructions are tacit all's fair
or not so fair in love's nutrition war. Like so:
have you ever deveined shrimp? Uh-huh,
well DO THAT with love in your heart,
that dark stuff's not blood that's for sure. The part
you discard is as important as the kept stuff.
Once you do that for the umpteenth time
you begin to understand an Nth of the love
your better half has for you. Forget the dove
and hawk pretense. Oh, and be sure to zest the lime.
So enough of the backward looks to Persephone,
just remember the unwritten part of the recipe.

Would ya please?

7-8-2014

From 7-8-2014 USA Today section of the Nashville Tennessean

Coinciding on the same day, the newspaper reports: Pope Francis asking forgiveness for years of silence on proven child molestation practices in the Catholic Church

Simple Transformations

By the time the Vatican children got the Psalms
Encrypted acrostics were lost on them.
Still the spirit came through postmortem
To come across with the balms.
In the condensing of 150 crafted pleas,
Lay people got the rosary
Like silk led way to hosiery
Kindness slips in from worms to tootsies.
Not all our greatest aspirations
Owe we to high-minded intents
When we come up short and bent
God abides in basement gyrations:
Off center, never; calm in the middle. 
Doing the work with what we think little.

7-7-2014

Science Faction Sonnet

Time is more limber than a prima ballerina,
and yet our use of it's so inflexible.
It is like we found a wonderful concertina
and use it to pump petrochemicals.
I'm not one of those to promote changing
the past, but if we could bend spacetime, 
think of the radio detection and ranging
benefits. No more dropouts on Facetime
or Skype. Just do the Tesseract tango
and voila there you are and all done without
rockets or airplanes or ships. If man goes
not to Alpha Centauri, then bring it to him. No doubt
the steps to such a dance are admittedly quite tricky,
but what is our raison d'etre,  if not to make time doohickeys?

7-6-2014

Avsjo Station, Stockholm, Sweden May 2010 

Training Sonnet
First trace out fourteen lines in near Elizabethan style!
Then tap your feet five times and know iamb.
Next hear ABBA and rhyme your jam.
Just beat, repeat and dance with chance a while.
So hop the next quatrain, enjoy the ride
through past landscapes in lines new found.
And as you go note how you form the sound.
Make sense survive,  but mind your style outside.
The next quatrain is here before you know it.
Feel the clicking tracks lullaby:
somnambulant dreamscapes passing by.    
Trunks stowed well with meaning: The heft of cargo wit.
And in no time at all your last lines and couplet
arrive: depot, exit  riders in double-step.  

7-5-2014

In praise of my pen pal

The treasure that she handed me, i held up to the light.
What tiny hand would hold this avian quill 
to capture the saga of a moment? A child's might
i suppose, but i lose the tale in imagining a cardinal on a sill.
None the worse for its loss and my gain. Head cocked,  
he perches to see if my window box is a feeder
in disguise or maybe to remind me the flowers should be restocked,
as the ones that graced the window have gone to seed or
merely done their joyful duty and passed back
their time-bound beauty to the sphere from whence it came.
Or maybe it was a token from God to fill my lack
of subject for the letter i write daily to tame
my curious nature and contact my pen pal, unknown
though God remains, but not so, perhaps just together alone.   

Independence Day

Independence Dei

Defining independence is a tricky business.
"Freedom, liberty and justice for all"
are words thrown casually about as is "forgiveness."
As ephemeral as fireworks after night baseball
games, the red, white and blue sky smoke trails
leave us short of breath, unsure of what to think
of the cost others have paid with their lives
so we can celebrate. And the original patriot winks
from beyond, claims no country his and continually gives
the lesson of selfless love of the unknown neighbor
or enemy by studied restraint and unstudied sparks 
of flaming spirit he shares with heaven by friendly labor
of pulling the nets in when faith seems gone or a lark,
but not so! Still, inspiration fills, at the darkest hour, our hearts' sails.

July 3, 2014

The best use of enchantment
(For Helen and Aidan and You)

I want to tell you of an overheard telephone exchange 
I was fortunate enough to hear one side of in my office
years ago when i had no children: real, god- or other. Strange
how in that time in Philadelphia, as a novice 
spouse, this struck me and stuck with me a long,
long time. My office mate and i were working late as usual
and he took the time to call his young sons,
as they prepared for bed and told a story all seussical
like. And when the rhymes receded and the tale was done,
he told them each, in no uncertain terms, how important 
they were to him and not just to him but to everyone.
And i thought what a wonderful thing to hear after Horton,
when one is with one's brother in a bed of wonder.
Protection later on from hateful words' scary thunder. 

July 2, 2014

The evolution of poetry to advertising

"But this is just the floor sample?" the owner
eyes me with arched brow. i recycle my plea.
"I need it to sell the real stuff, its only a loaner.
You can take it to match with your furniture, see?
But i want it back." We both grasp each other's parapet.
i move my thumbs back an forth appraising 
the texture of his resolve. Sale tactic: Tug o' carpet.
Wants to know how badly i want it. In releasing
i floor him. "Well the pattern is old skin for old wine
to my mind anyway." And now false hurt feelings 
is his counter move. "I only deal in eternal designs
i'll have you know, sir." Though the blue with the two 
climbing men (behind them a third) doesn't fool
me, i won't take him to the carpet for his remnant jewel.  

7-1-2014

Art Irritates Nature

Because i could not build a fortress
it kindly built for me: around the garden
in my backyard to shield from bunny distress.
The curly white fence is more than style: warden
of all i survey. The plants must think it queer 
to see me defend from attacks this way.
Neighbors shuffle quickly by: eyes agog with fear.
Patrolling in bunny warrior helm, i sense their dismay.
Protecting from vegetable thieves is not for the weak
of heart. With Sting streaming from the radio
I step wherever I want except where the Peke
squatted.  As with every wall, the proof is in the mending,
especially if one's not sure which side one is defending.