When my mom was a kid her older sister came home one day and announced to their mother with barely contained excitement, “Judy Locke says there’s a radio with pictures!” My grandmother replied sternly, “Don’t believe everything Judy Locke says.” Good advice, really.
It’s Poetry Month and anything goes! Today the archaeological dig that is spring cleaning unearthed some poetry from 2002. Ah, the early aughts! The collection includes more pseudo-sonnets along with other song-nets that I wove back in the wayback. In the spirit of all things metrical, I decided to bring out these artifacts, dust them off for spring and place them ever so gently in this digital display case.
Brace yourselves for the angstiness, friends! It’s going to be a bumpy Poetry Month!
It’s National Poetry Month, and since April is the cruelest month, why not torture myself with a sonnet? The degree of adherence to iambic pentameter is always a ready source of personal angst. Did I really throw in two random lines in iambic hexameter?! Scan that, poetry geeks. Anyway, writing a sonnet is hard. There will be rhyming and gnashing of teeth. Writing a sonnet that doesn’t sound pretentiously archaic is harder, all the more so for me, since “pretentiously archaic” is arguably a description of my character. As for the meadowlarks, I can’t help them. They come back every year like clichés.
My day on the slopes had been less than awesome. It was too warm. But, you know, still better than the best day at work. Near dusk I was headed back to the car with my board, ready to roll one and hit a dive bar. Some red-faced suburbanite in a $60,000 grocery-catcher was blowing a gasket on another driver, screaming and flipping him off with the window rolled down. He ran up over the curb and peeled out of the lot, tires squealing. Should’ve stuck around for a toke, that guy. Not that he’d hang with a dude like me. That guy won’t touch the so-called gateway drug. Probably drives with a bottle of Seagram’s under the front seat, though. Anyway, that’s when I heard it. Louder than the mosh pit at a Mudhoney show. A deafening noise of steel on asphalt. I turned around.
Nestled in the stream’s hallowed bed, people enter the world as salmon. The salmon people come here to weave their baskets. To live a story is to weave a basket.
Tripping down some March hare’s hole recently, I happened upon a stunningly beautiful icon of the Essene Mary Magdalene. Not my usual territory, but nevertheless it inspired this ekphrastic offering.
“Crowd” is a term I learned from my Sámi mentor. Each of us has a Crowd, he taught, a tribe of spirits who follow our lives with interest, ready to assist if we are willing to look for the evidence of their work.