Dear reader,
in 1973, Picasso dies on the Buddha’s birthday which all is recognized as having had happen on the eighth of April. This also happens to be today, and probably not by coincidence or design it is Kofi Annan’s birthday as well.
Today my wife goes grocery shopping, today she restocks us on sympathy cards because it has been a tough year and we’ve run short by one. My good friends mother passed suddenly and she is now going home. Today is a grieving day for many I know and I think deeply, meditate on what has happened, there is nothing I can do for my friend, there is nothing he has asked so I wait for further instruction. My thoughts are with him and his wife and his departed Mother. She was a good woman I hear, I was not of her company, and if you are the praying sort, pray for her now. If you are the meditating sort, meditate on the swiftness of death and the suddenness of her departure for her final, our final home.
Noah, I am with you where you are where you must be surrounded by love. Our hands are offered if you need but I doubt you will read this today.
I’ve discovered a poem amongst the completed poems of 2009 that had a word misspelled that completely altered the meaning and readability. So much so I couldn’t figure out the word and had to refer to the original draft. Sometimes MS Word auto corrects Bach to be back without due consideration for the content of the phrasing. The alteration did not improve the whole but destroyed it. Now even with the word corrected the whole is a loss and needs to be taken down to the studs and begun again.
the last three lines (containing the error now rectified) go thus:
the radio switches to Bach;
I make leave to
urinate.
as a haiku it would suck – as the ending of a poem it is decent but now needs a poem in front of it. Speaking of Haiku, here is some – not-haiku. I don’t write haiku, I used to but got tired of arguing with people stuck of the 5-7-5 but more than willing to ignore the necessary line references – Tomorrow I will excerpt my treatise on Haiku as today I talk about not-haiku.
Falling leaves:
Magnificent!
Whose illusion?
____________________________
Killed a bug: my
life should be
so important.
___________________________
Melting snow.
The sounds of lovemaking
are infinitely brutal.
– Hoc Scripsi
There are dozens of these in my folders and binders. I really like to write them as an exercise in the correct words as they are meant to be painfully concise, and vividly detailed. I think each one goes through at least a weeks worth of revision and often ends nearer to the first draft than the seventh or seventeenth depending on how far I take it. Some – like the second were there immediately and took no revision. It was a moment when I had smashed some poor creature who was part of a greater whole, killed while performing some unknown vital task, and I took it’s life instantly filling with regret at the realization of the enormity and importance of such small beings. It was a satori moment for me.
next I thought of David Ignatow and how he captured a similar experience in a poem about killing a fly. that can be found here and here is a page of the book it is from, scanned by Google.
my auto correct knows to capitalize Google but not how to spell Bach. humph.
Tell your friends and lovers
morning came more quickly than I imagined. Hard time falling off to sleep, woke up a few times to wander aimlessly around the house, and a hard time awakening finally. Yesterday, after the second post I had found my way in and wrote eight poems, all 10 lines or under for a specific submission but I was proud of them all.
the platitudes of willful resemblance 