12-12-12 - double chai*- a 30th anniversary poem -

12-12-12

You are my double chai guy

My second chance at

A first life

Of sparkle

Of love and light

Wisdom and an inexplicable

Undeniable, unbreakable

Kindred bond

Born somewhere

Beyond understanding

Leading me

To Believe

With a fervent heart

And a clear head

that there

Is something in this

Grand Universe

That is Benevolent

And unimaginably

Kind…

To Believe

In You

And in Us

Forever

In the arms of

Love...

*chai is symbolized by the number 18 and translates loosely to mean "life"
today 12-12-12 adds up to 36 equally double chai....and my 30th wedding anniversary, each year of which has flown by with a smile 

Wordsmith - December Fiction Fest: Seasonal Short Story Challenge No. 2 - The Package

“The Package”

“The thing about gifts is that there’s always a person behind them.”  This was the kind of thing my mother would say.  The thing about my mother and her proclamations was that they could mean anything.  Not that I knew what she was talking about most of the time.  And, that winter day of my fifth birthday sitting in the kitchen with her, I can remember the package sitting on the table with a large red bow – and silver foil paper.  There was snow falling outside, the pretty kind, fat wet flakes that were hiding the cars parked across the street and making the stick of the tree outside the apartment sparkle.

I wasn’t sure when the package had arrived but it was clear it was for me.  What wasn’t clear was whether I would get it or not.  It depended.  I watched her face. “Yep, there’s always somebody behind a present.” She looked at me then, flushed and her hand holding her hair back from her face.  Of course, then I could see, by the glitter in her eyes, that it was not going to be a happy birthday. I just didn’t have any idea how bad it was going to get.

She wasn’t always like this.  It had something to do with when she drank, or what she drank.  Because even that didn’t have any sense to it.  Sometimes when she drank red wine, so dark it was almost purple she’d cuddle and smile in that sleepy grin she had and we had some great nights.  On one of those nights I slept in bed with her all night.  “A pajama party.” She called it.  In the morning, she told me she had no idea why I was “such a little shit, that I had to ruin her sleep by coming into her room.”

But, that was my mother.  The really bad, times were when drank vodka.  I think that was the first word I could read.  She kept it in the freezer so it was nice and cold, and she always started out happy – sometimes she even sang – more than three times she danced and once with me in her arms.  That morning of my fifth birthday was a vodka birthday and the only thing that could turn my mother faster was the mention of my father.  I don’t know why he came that morning, what made him think that anything would be any different, but he did.  I was just getting to the point of deciding that the glitter in her eyes and her face getting red was all adding up to trouble.  I was trying hard not to give her any reason to turn the anger that I knew was boiling up in her onto me. I kept my eyes away from the package, even though she had put it right there in the middle of the table.  And all of sudden there was knock on the door – a hard knock that sounded like a drum beat.  I can tell you my heart was beating hard, anyone’s would be beating hard if you saw my mother’s face. 

“I know it’s you!” she screamed.  “You son of a bitch” and in one movement she got up and picked up the package and went to the door and opened it.  I could feel the cold air rush in like it was trying to grab me and take me with it.  Then the door slammed hard, and I peeked.  I didn’t care what would happen to me, and I saw for the first time the back of the man that I knew was my father bending down to pick up a silver foil package in the snow and walk, without looking back out of my life.

Behatted

Behatted 


He wore a hat
Slanted just so
Forged against
Relentless  stress
He wore his hat

She wore a hat
As a filigreed egg
shell perched in
delicate slouch
She wore her hat

Each Innate walked
the  boggy coast of emotions'
raging rampant spectrum

With bland
Faces into the winds
Hats whipped from
Heads

They met

Chasing their
tumbling hats 
over marshed
fragrant fields
to the horizon
there just ahead
on the ribboned
running path to
Rejuvenate

In The Company of.....

In The Company of Henry Thoreau

I walk around the pond
and meet him head on
coming toward me –
and we both turn and
with a deep breath
regain our solitude and
walk
the
other
way

My Next Big Thing - Blog Chain - Michele Brenton Interviewer

My Next Big Thing

I was recently invited to participate in a blog chain known as My Next Big Thing.  This blog chain is NOT a chain letter … oooh … ugh … but rather,  a way for writers to connect their work and themselves to one another.  Formerly limited to writers of novels, my invitee, interviewer, Michele Poet aka Michele Brenton, has broadened the circle by including poets as well.  I joyfully accepted this invitation and hope you will enjoy reading the interview questioning as much as I enjoyed responding.

First of all, I want to thank Michele for this opportunity and tell you a little about our much more than virtual relationship. I met Michele Poet years and years ago – as contributor of wonderful, usually humorous poems at an online poetry site.  Later, I came to know Michele as a fabulously accomplished poet, and short story and fiction writer, who has met a series of deeply challenging life experiences with the fluidity, irony and humor and ease of a slip on a banana peel.  It is no wonder to me now, that this remarkably talented woman was known to me originally as Banana-the-poet.  Among a great body of published work, Michele has a recent brilliant satire of which was a top best-seller at Kindle.   I am extremely honoured to be interviewed by a woman who is the essence of the poetic/creative spirit.  Please give yourself a huge gift and visit Michele at: 

http://www.facebook.com/l/yAQEhzXK7AQEjOjKiz0I2Qiokqr0rRqskcBcOxdIazO5jLg/banana.blog.co.uk

What is the working title of your book or project?

Missing Kaitlin –

~

What sparked the project/book/work off?

A character, along with her grisly demise, that appeared to me in response to a poetry prompt for an inverted pyramid poem.  The type of writing that is often employed in prose form in newspaper writing (so that the most important details are up front in case editing for space is needed.  The poem was about a four-year-old raped and murdered little girl named Kaitlin, and a series of such poems followed.

~
How would you describe your project/book/piece of work?

The novel evolved from a straight-forward “child-gone-missing thriller” into an exploration of the lines that blur reality and imagination, sanity and delusion.

~

How long did it take you to find your own style and voice?

In terms of poetry, I believe I arrived hard-wired with a style and voice. Poetry, has always seemed a to offer a clearer way of communicating in a multi-faceted manner, more suited to describing experience than the linear language of conversation and/or prose writing.  In terms of poetry writing, but for the personal poems written for someone – I have had this voice and/or style since I could physically write – frankly I make no claims for my poetry as it simply seems as I am a ‘transcriber’ rather than a writer – I have no idea where poetry originates except in some preconscious part of my being or – perhaps someone else’s being – mhmmm I simply accept such without much speculation as I believe such thinking would lead me in far flung directions that I am not quite ready to explore.  Now, in terms of non-fiction the sense of being able to synthesize various ideas and to generate a new ‘spin’ if you will, from latent facts has also been with me since my earliest years, and comes fairly easily and probably has a great deal to do with my many, many, many years of schooling.  I was the grad student who would hand in, I kid you not, a 70 page paper when asked for a 7 page paper.  When asked for a clarification or correction of my dissertation I simply rewrote the entire dissertation.  It took many years, a wonderful mentor/professor who received one of these overblown papers who asked me “hasn’t anyone ever stopped you?” and about 800 hours of analysis to realize that there was something less than thrilling (to others) about this type of manic writing.  So, yes, hurrah for me.  But we now come to the desert, the void, the chasm, the silence of ease never mind hurrahs.  The elusive novel, that I have waited patiently for since I was nine years old and felt certain that I could write. I’ve had three non-fiction books published, a dissertation, numerous papers written in decades of schooling, poetry published online and in print, some micro fiction - however – I am still waiting and now as life moves quickly on I find that I am actively searching for the naturalism that I has been such an comfortable part of me and which continues to elude me and in my novel writing. I am grateful for all other writing, but I will not consider myself (in my own eyes) a real writer until I can complete a novel that I would want to read.

~
In what ways do you think 'writer you' differs from or has similarities to the everyday you?

I’m not sure it does, which can make getting a container of milk the subject of existential musing.  My father once said that I “speak the way other people write.”  I think now he might have had a point, but the problem is that I find, when it comes to my novels I have things turned around.  I may “speak the way other people write” (oh my what a bore I must be!) but I know that I too often “write the way other people speak” and lose the vivid detail and description that have many in my life listening to me tell a story whisper, eye-roll or mutter “get to the point.”  My novels too quickly arrive at the point with nowhere to go.  Mhmmm.

~
Who or What makes you pick up that pen or start typing at the keyboard?

The need to write is an impetus that has, as previously described been with me from a very early age, perhaps as young as seven.  I’m not at all certain who the “who” or “what” is that drives this compulsion – I suspect the question and the uncertainty of the answer might be similar as to who or what drove that first explosion that led to creation on a far grander scale.  I know that if I do not write, I feel disorganized in my thinking and that writing at any time provides a sense of serenity, order, release and accomplishment.  Sooo “who?” or “what?” unclear but I am grateful for the ability. 

~

Imagine someone waved a magic wand and you were only able to write one book in your lifetime and you knew it would be perfect and say exactly what you intended and be understood and appreciated by everyone; what would you write about?

Haha.  This is a wonderfully trick question.  If I were to know the answer to this question I would be delighted to have now completed this interview to set my fingers free and flying about the keyboard writing as quickly as possible.  You see, I have been convinced since I was in the third grade that if I were to know “the book” that I wanted to write – I would be able to write it as easily I can write a simple rhyming verse. What “would I write about?”  Ah, something grandly simple that captured the human sense of fragility and strength, that captivated the reader and transported them to another place where they’d fall into the story, linger about the final pages, unwilling to let it go and leave in the wake of their reading a trail of laughter and tears as an ever ribboning tribute of rose petals over an endless horizon.  If I were able to write “the one perfect book” I would achieve what so many of us secretly long for – immortality – or at least a simple indelible chicken scratch on this spinning cerulean marble we all share. 

~

Thank you Michele for the opportunity to bore some more folks.  I have the greatest admiration for you, your writing and your creative spirit.

To continue the chain, I've put the same questions to several wonderful writers:

Barbara Ehrentreu  @ http://barbaraehrentreu.blogspot.com/

Ina Roy-Faderman   @ http://inourbooks.com/ (with Andrea Heiberg)

Laura Hegfield            @ http://www.shinethedivine.com/

Sharon Ingraham     @ http://www.networkedblogs.com/blog/poet-treehouse

Meena Rose                  @ http://2voices1song.com/

.

On December 11, at their respective blogs, Barbara, Ina, Laura, Sharon and Meena will tell you about their next big things. 

an affair to forget

~

an affair to forget 

it was an affair to forget

forlorn even as it was manic

cast in amber wax their

clash hewn of drive in the fuse

of desire – a fork in their ribboned

predetermined road

salted with storm-swept sand 

~