Posts for 2020 (page 141)

Your apology is like a paper airplane:

It is crudely crafted from juvenile perceptions of areodynamics.
You rip and fold your words to resemble what you think will fly,
You marvel at your perfidious attempts to fool me with personal touches.

You reach back and send it soaring through the air.
Your eyes sparkle as take-off goes well.
The flight follows a logical trajectory,
but truth’s gravity uncovers your faulty engineering.
You cannot disguise pretense.
Your face falls as the flimsy contraption loses steam,
and takes a sudden nose-dive. 
I hear a pitiful “swish” as the paper slides along an abandoned, dirty floor.
The muted sound is all I need to hear while my back is turned,
and I’ve already lost interest.

No fiery crash.
No explosive sounds. 
Just an unfortunate wimper.

I step over it and find my way to “safety”.
I hope you left traces of your DNA for 
the investigators to find when they search the meaningless wreck.

Two otters swam gracefully 
in the creek alongside the road
me and Momma walked
they’d stop swimming
just long enough 
to watch us as we watched them

The little creek cut a lean path
beside the road
a swimming hole
filled with crawdads
and the two little curious otters
fishing, swimming, playing
putting on their show
walking clumsily along the rocks
diving into the deeper holes
bobbing their heads back up
a game of look and see

A harmony between the paved road
and flood tumbled creek
with its history written in the scars
of old storms come and gone

But you’d never know of any of those floods 
watching the two otters 
playing in the swimming hole
wearing their inquisitive unguarded curiousity
on their wildly expressive faces 
looking back at us looking at them
me and Momma love our walks 
little adventures tucked into the end of the day
all the storms having left their scars on the rocks 
a history of floods and raging waters 
but you’d never know it
watching the two otters play

Oops, sorry.
Ignore the dirt in my nails. 
I’ve spent the last ten years digging myself out of my own grave.  

Didn’t realize it would take me that long. 
Knew there was a load of dirt on top of me
                                                                           just not that much.  

Used my hands, but had to swallow some of it as well.
Didn’t go down very easy, choked me up a bit.
Brought tears to my eyes and a heaviness to my heart.  

But I kept digging.  

Sometimes you just have to do that.
                                                                           Keep digging
                                                                           Even though you’re
                                                                           Choked up and your
                                                                           Nails are dirty.

my closet stands bare,
just a few scattered old tanks and dress shirts
that didn’t fit the profile for my suitcase

my hardwood floor is now exposed,
the piles of things
shoved into a green suitcase
and a red duffle bag

I always overpack
I lie awake for hours the nights before
and make mental lists of 
unnecessary things to add

I don’t know when I’ll be coming home
so I even took my favorite collage,
framed in black,
just to make the room where I’ll be staying
more familiar

The boot is packed, with a
french horn, bicycle, boxes of food,
suitcases, random pairs of shoes, pillows
and so much more

we are ready to leave this place,
to see the people we love
and take a break from each other.

Now I’m a big fan of the recumbent bike.
Bike a sprint, then lower the rate.
You want some stress, some sweat.
Along with fewer nighttime snacks,
watch the carbohydrates.

Yes, you can mix walking and jogging.
If you feel tightness in the chest,
stop. But, for most of us,

running runs its course. The heart stiffens.
Normal circulation never returns.
The heart doesn’t relax.

manpath –
determine path

MANPATH is set,
manpath will simply display its contents
and issue a warning.

manpath will determine a suitable path
and display the results.

The path is determined using information gained
from the configuration and the user’s environment.
OPTIONS
–quiet
Do not issue warnings.

–global
Produce a manpath consisting of all paths

man must override
the SYSTEM environment.

MANPATH displays its value
rather than determining it on the fly.

the value is determined from the content

comes at the end.

—
Found poem (erasure) from Linux Man Pages
https://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man1/manpath.1.html
AUTHOR
Wilf. (G.Wilford@ee.surrey.ac.uk).
Fabrizio Polacco (fpolacco@debian.org).
Colin Watson (cjwatson@debian.org).

At worst, Mr. Huntingdon,
M. Emanuel.

When you need me, which you will,
I will be walking the moors.
Petulant Heathcliff.

This wild hair in another time is not as wild.
I set pen to paper day after day
after day after day.

If it takes me the rest of my life,
Which it may.

And you are Mr. Rochester

The ocean bobs the raft up and down,
The movement is very calming and smooth,
Happiness comes and life is wonderous,
Until the impending storm arrives,
Churning and twisting the water,
Throwing the raft in every direction,
Until the raft tips over,
And you sink to the bottom of the ocean,
With no chance at salvation

I know I seem short with my words
it just gets hard to write with these fingers I have popped ritually, five minute mark
one day soon my attention span will be long enou-

so anyways the other day…

When I was a kid they said 4 leaf clovers
bring good luck 
So I scoured the jaunty green 
clovers to pluck
careful to avoid bees sucking nectar
and spreading pollen
from the white bristle headed blooms.

I would always  find one
during the hunt
place it in a book or my Bible 
to flatten
my lucky charm.
The thrill was in the hunt.
I forgot about my talisman
never contemplating if indeed
Good fortune came my way.
I learned early on 
I was not the driver of Destiny
and too young to know
Synchronicity..