zodiacal wanderings...

‘Air Sign'
 that is, until I get my geminectomy

then I wander the Astro Mall a free agent

perusing the dioramas 

         Libras and Aries and Taurii--

thumbing through the attributes

      ‘grounded’   ‘quick to judge’   ‘rational’

                                    ‘deliberate’—

but when all is said and scrutinized

The blue depths call to me…..

ah, Pisces

guadalajara

Locomotives idle at their sidings
The world over
The big Case-Hellwig diesels
At low rpms
Trundling the summer air
With a bass vibrato
Or occasional slow rev
Flashing what horsepower:
The steel-wheel'd gods
Bide their time.

street football

An old argument breaks out
     over the rush count-
          three alligators or four?

[for Lew Toll]

handyman

Rather than return home
    and fetch the ladder I forgot
I take wild chances
    balancing on lawnchair & flowerpot

Colors

The free-thinker, who shuns orthodoxies of every stripe, views the flags or 'colors' of the various nations with the same regard as the colors worn by street gangs: one dissolved into the the formidable Many

-Alvarez

ice-pond

Ron
Kon
Koma:

Non
Sequi
Tur

canyons

Coming to know
          the varied land
                    like the nose of a puma

-beckville

Alisdair

forgot his lunch
       now I have to give him
                half mine

sunnyvale

At the wrong station
     waiting for
          a nonexistent train

swan-levine

Deep in leaves

            Under flowering magnolias

                        The old mower sleeps

-Swan-Levine

northern rockies

To be brazenly a vagabond

Unapologetic

Drifting down the hours

Answering to no compunction of clock or calendar

Yes to have all the morning to oneself

And all the slow measure of afternoon
By evening sitting on a rough bluff looking over the Big Sandy
Or walking the starry bliss of crushed rock 
Where the road ends in Wyoming—

Silent lightning  flashing far off in the blue Tetons

-w/ Tricia 2005

debate

With raised voices
            the roof-carpenters
                        argue astrology

gold hollow

Up the steel rungs
            to swing my leg over
                        the STAY OFF DAM sign

-Lake Vera

*V

Poker winnings
            Pushed in his socks
                        When his wife knocks

How To Write Good

Exaggeration is a billion times worse than understatement.

Avoid alliteration always.

Prepositions are not words to end sentences with.

Avoid cliches like the plague (they're old hat).

Eschew ampersands & abbreviations, etc.

One should never generalize.

Comparisons are as bad as cliches.

Be more or less specific.

Sentence fragments? Eliminate.

I've told you a million times- never exaggerate.

Who needs rhetorical questions?

ISIS, etc etc etc

    what do human beings find more compelling than this inclination to belong to some larger association with others, magnetic enough to buy into the brain-contouring required, to leave one's natural skepticism at the door and submit to some or another stripe of orthodoxy?

Titanic

What world is this where hulls of glacial ice
Reprove the hand of man,
Christened steamers and their human cargo
Tumbling thirteen thousand feet
Into further blackness?
This no trifling world my friend,
I've seen the photographs,
Teak decks and life-rings under strobelights
In a place out of mind,
Two miles down.

time, reconsidered

Turn horizontal time inside-out & linear extension becomes deeply vertical; the counting of sun-orbits [weeks, months, years etc] morphs into the sun itself...

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