Posts for June 15, 2025 (page 10)

Love makes you bold,
but it doesn’t make you smart.
Hate can bring anger,
but you are still in the dark.
Fighting for what’s right is easy with friends by your side.
It’s a different story, when their tongues are full of lies.
Capture a rainbow, and stuff it in your brain.
Keep it for when things get tough in the pouring rain.
I never said I had the answer,
never said I knew the way.
I just followed the lightning and it led us astray.
Will you take my hand as I walk through the crowd? 
Will you walk with me with our head in the clouds? 
It’s a lot lighter up here, trying to stand tall,
Where all that craziness below just seems so small.

Now we’re into numbers I can feel
My dad was 5 in 1925
I was born when he was 29, so 1949
Now those are numbers you can say
Unlike 2007, it doesn’t roll
2049 is easy too, I’ll be 100
Is that “a hundred” or “one hundred”
I’ll be the stoic old man by the window
101 outside in the shade
Is that one oh one or one hundred and one
Is aught still a word?
Now a broken rock turns up in my yard
Several of them, a busted up pool table
Beveled bolt holes, cut out corners, inch and a half thick
One peice, a triangle, as big as a tomb stone
Has a lot number carved in, 78 2028
As I was thinking about. numbers I came to a stop
There are about six weeks there at the beginning of 2028
When I will be 78

You’ve been away
yet always near by.
Sprinkled in rivers and cities
secretly in global bays.
The teachings stay strong
solid foundation ethical core
with an onery touch and twinkle of eye.
They say I should have been named Georgeann
as my traits of you have gone life long
Pround to be George’s daughter, even if didn’t always go to plan!

I breath in.
Dark.
Cold.
Starlight, black trees and pastures.
Fields, snow on the ground faint blue in the winter midnight.
I exhale and a damp mist billows from my face.
I can see a million molecules of water, breath, bacteria,
ME Pouring into the night sky  
Illuminated crystalline red  
By the brake lights of a parked car.  
Each breath brings ice into my nose, freezing, it’s THAT cold.  
My friends and I are trespassing.  
I am 23 years old.
We laugh and climb the slat fence coated in ice  
Looking for a suitable sledding hill in the farm bottoms of South-Central Kentucky.
Our bottles of beer retrieved from the snow  
Impossibly cold with slushy ice in each swallow.
The universe is well upon us this eve.
It is the birthday of my woman and she has declined to go.
Too cold.  
My last words to her are coming soon enough although I don’t know it yet.  
This hour is a dream sequence,
A full-on acid trip in my memory,
Piercing stars in the sky,
The wind, It’s breath a cold clarity on my face.
The night is blue and stark,
Faint shadows cast by the moonlight and stars,
The taunts and jests of my companions, good friends.
Such a thing,
The delight of the Gods.
The joy in the making,
Transparent and ephemeral.

Later, home.    
How was it?  

Fun. Cold.    
I wanna go to O’Charley’s for my birthday. They have half off tall boys and bottomless wings.  

OK. I got you something.
I’ll give it to you there if you like.
We’ll celebrate then.

On Wednesday he was targeted
by the cast of Les Mis
as they sang their songs of equality.

On Saturday he presided
over his military parade.

Arizona trailer, sunbleached —
air vents blowing signs of things to come,
lifting our t-shirts into bodies
we weren’t old enough to grow.

It made us laugh,
uncorrected
in nighties, jellies, and desert dusk —
mini Marilyn Monroes.

My grandfather,
who never once landed a joke
I understood,
knitted afghans like riddles
only he could read.
He’d sit up with me through Taxi,
smile along with the laugh track,
then quietly retreat
when Kirk came on,
ceding the couch to my prepubescence,
my obsessions
and notions of honor
among thieves and gentlemen
in deep space.

I read the TV Guide like scripture—
circled titles
and broadcast times
in pencil.
If it was one I hadn’t seen,
I’d sit upright,
at attention,
like watching it right might
save the redshirts this time.

If I’d seen it before,
I watched anyway
to feel all the subtle notes
repeat themselves.

That was our pact,
my inheritance,
the wordless lesson he taught me
of leaving well enough alone.

Now that the sun has abandoned you
along with this world and the other stars,
it’s time to empty your backpack of all the tools
you learned to use to forge a life you could live with.
Now you have nothing left, no money, no keys,
only your curiosity about what you could never know
at all, what no one could ever know. Your passions
and your discoveries have not succeeded
in putting you on any paved road.

Wild creatures stampede
through that forest fire, my heart.
Hear it and feel it.

Now you are nothing but the disease
that has come for you and overcome you,
nothing but a self-propelling dream without a prayer
of coming true, nothing but love, disembodied
and throwing itself into nothingness in all directions.
Now you are only the distance between what
you were and what you wanted, and yet you leave traces
of your memories and hopes, your yearning and fears,
as the rest of us go on, sweating and spitting
at the great gaping nothingness closing in on us.

Throw your dictionary out.
You’re going where words can’t go.

Curbing my appetite a little longer

Turbulence on a plane

Ripples on the lake’s surface

My hair blown wayward in the wind

Snow, sleet, wind, hail, rain

The walking path of a stranger

The curls’ rebellion

Banging of a gavel, a swift decision

Words out of mouths

We’ll never grasp it

Or hold it in our palm

Like a bird born wild

I will never have it

It will never be mine

I’m thinking today of my grandmother
a strong country woman, schooled
in hard work, grief, and superstition.

She hummed old hymns as she rolled dough,
punched out biscuits, and swept the family store’s
black-oiled floors with scattered salt at closing time.

In a cotton dress, she weeded her flower beds
until the slate black ground framed
purple iris, red canna, and four o’clocks
that bloomed on time.