Be Poet Laureate of Anywhere.

Get Breadloaf funding this year.

Get a low-residency MFA in poetry & fiction.

Write a fan letter to Kay Ryan.

Write.

so mate really stepped up this evening, spending time after the session, when we normally have a beer or dinner together, to attentively read over and talk about some stuff I’d written but that wasn’t got to during the hour) and I started thinking about Merchant of Venice and the pound of flesh and the quality of mercy not being strained and all, and it reminded me about an interview I heard recently with a Holocaust survivor who gives talks about forgiveness and how lots of people get really mad at her, and how I am really pissed off, and how the persecution of (and maybe even the caricature of) Shylock is supposed to make us uncomfortable or sick, and to think about the very human notion that SOME THINGS are unforgivable, and how that’s the deal, that forgiveness is not part of an equation, you can’t weigh it on a scale like a pound of flesh, it’s an entirely different beast altogether. Maybe it’s like giving something back that you’ve been carrying around, but instead the burden just vanishes.

Well, that’s all speculation. I’m still pissed. But I’m a little less pissed than I used to be.

Ancient Geezer: Don’t put women on a submarine!! I was there.

His Sixtyish-Year-Old Daughter: Well…....now that they’re getting fewer volunteers, women are taking advantage of that.

Younger Geezer: I’m more worried about the changes to the ban on homosexuality. That’s what’s really going to change the nature of the Navy.

[crickets chirping over the sounds of coffee being slurped]

Younger Geezer: I mean you know what it’s like in Amsterdam. You know you can buy a hooker on the street over there. Just because they have Sodom and Gomorrah over there doesn’t mean we have to have it over here.

[more crickets and slurping]

Younger Geezer: I just don’t want to be around that. I don’t want one of them around me. Not without my permission.

[bright and cheery 20-year-old counter kid pops over to announce that the manager, who is obviously well-acquainted with this guy, wants to talk to him]

I don’t know whether to cry or hurl. Maybe I should do both at once. That should make a statement.

Note: young Geezer is a paunchy, neckless, balding man with rosacea and Mr. Rogers lace-up loafers whom I very much doubt any self-respecting Navy Homo would touch with a ramrod, let alone get “next” to

Sheesh. I thought I could at least get away from pure evil at a sweet little tourist/family chain restaurant. At least if this guy’s head suddenly spins around and he projectile-vomits nuclear waste, I can be reasonably certain of being rescued by a chirpy, apple-cheeked 20-year old. Reasonably….

Mantle

I´m suddenly reminded of an old button I had reading simply “Participant”...don´t know where it´s got to…I probably decided I´d outgrown it and gave it away…I could use it now!

I sleep beneath it,
wear it like a shield. Matters
not: the same mantle.

Understanding, the gesture of understanding
the mind makes,
that beautiful grasping arc

a sweeping curtsey,
a bow after great effort
a coy and extravagant reverence
while people throw flowers, perhaps
because they´ve brought them

but

standing, to stand a thing
to stand it, to stand the thing you can´t
even understand

this is more like standing under,
really, standing up
under an onslaught of
weather, an attack, or a
waterfall. Or it´s just like
a wall,
this standing,
a wall
off of which the mind bounces,
that erstwhile dancer
curled and compact
as if it were light
and vivacious as
a ball

Dance Floor at Hooley´s Irish Pub

How many boot heels
before these old boards were graved
with the casual scrawl

of tombstone stars?

Vengeance

Dad, I imagined
a discreet bourré. Yet how
few are the feet of earth

between us, now.

I had such a cool dream last night. I think it was inspired by an email I sent yesterday dramatizing an event in dialogue. I went on to dream that a play of mine had been produced in a gigantic, lavishly beautiful opera house (complete with gorgeous painted sets). Unfortunately, I did not dream the script of the entire play, LOL. I do remember that it was more surrealist than something I would normally write and ended with a voiceover saying, “I think I can live here.” LOL What a happy ending!

or by years of intelligent effort, or both. It represents one of the most arduous conquests of the human spirit: the triumph of feeling and thought over the natural sins of language.”

T.S. Eliot