The Sunday Poem

It’s hard to understand, these days, how prized writing once was. Everywhere we turn there is verbal diarrhea, an endless stream of twittering: there’s blog diaries and fan fiction and political ideologues, there’s spin and truthiness and position papers, there’s stories that perhaps don’t deserve to be told. We live in a world that is abundant in writing, abundant in books, with little sense of how once each carefully formed letter was a bulwark against the collapse of civilization.

Read More “The Sunday Poem: Flicker”

Today, news broke of yet more clues in the ongoing search for Amelia Earhart’s final resting place. It’s a fascinating story, of course, with red herrings and silly conspiracy theories and bad movies made. And it prompts a poem cobbled from Wikipedia references and article tidbits.

“This is Amelia Earhart. Ship is on a reef south of the equator.”
–heard by Dana Randolph of Rock Springs, Wyoming, via shortwave radio

Itasca, Itasca, why won’t you come in?
Two days, Noonan sick, and now the plane’s a-tilt,
The engine dipping wet to the lagoon. Read More “The Sunday Poem: Amelia on Nikumaroro”

Everything dies. We all know it: whether it be the sickly sweet smell of something small somewhere under the bushes in the front yard, or the more leisurely and somehow more dramatic deaths of institutions, houses, entire countries. Baghdad has been where it is for a few thousand years and once was renowned for its greenery; no doubt it rests on the bones of itself, in ongoing self-renewal.

As you might guess, this here is a grim little poem. 🙂 The original draft dates back to 1990.

Read More “The Sunday Poem: Driveways”

One of the things about conference is that you never get enough sleep. I seem to have inadvertantly acquired a mental skill, one that perhaps does not rival Dr. Bartle’s ability to rewrite his perceptions of the world around him with his mind, but is nonetheless fascinating to me. I have developed, in the last year, an extremely accurate internal alarm clock.

No matter what time zone I am in, no matter how much or little sleep I have had, when I set the alarm for a given time, I will reliably wake up exactly ten minutes before it goes off. It happened yet again today — despite the loss of an hour for daylight savings time. Right on schedule, I awaken… looked too dark to be the right time — maybe I get that wonderful chance to snuggle back under the covers and drift for a while. But no — my internal clock was right.

I am most upset at being robbed of ten minutes a day of sleep. I like sleep. One of my favorite hobbies. The method my dreams have for waking me isn’t always pleasant either — last night, it was being a detective in a TV show, and I awoke when I was shot by a suspect and written out.

Anyway, here’s the poem, written fresh this morning, still piping hot from the oven. Apologies for the puns, bonus points to anyone who spots them all. 😉

Circadian

If time is ticking and we tick off time
Then we must be madly ticking, clicking off time
In little hash marks like wrinkles, dimples,
Divots and dashes across ourselves and our minds.
Read More “The Sunday Poem: Circadian”

So there’s this poem on my hard drive. I do not recall ever writing it. It sits in a folder with other poems I wrote, but I have a suspicion that I actually read it somewhere, loved it, and typed it in to keep it around. Or it was sent to me by a friend who writes, in a letter or something — quite possible, actually. The memory eludes me. Aspects of it don’t sound to me like my writing, though other aspects do.

I have Googled for it, and never found it online. But there are billions of poems that are not online. So I am posting it, and maybe someone out there knows where the heck it came from. It’s in a folder for 1995. And no matter who wrote it, I think it’s worth a read. So maybe the collective wisdom of the Internet can figure it out.
Read More “The Sunday Poem: I don’t think I wrote this”