(warning: for reasons of its own, this poem will be rhyming more and more furiously as it goes along, at times lapsing into limerick. Perhaps this has something to do with the habit of roaches to clone themselves in a tumultous and accelerating way??) India, 1974 I’m heaving lemon-tarts…
Relaxing Back Balls For minor back distress (for example if you lift something just that much too heavy) and to prevent it from becoming worse, I have found this of enormous value: take two tennis balls or racquet balls – depending on your size – and at first sign of…
Once, rather long ago, a wee baby girl curled up like a seedling in her mother’s womb, and maybe she was eventually pressing her face against its warm walls so hard, trying to see what was going on out there, that her little nose got smashed, or maybe she was…
Once in the early 90’s I had occasion to stay in an odd little house on the side of a ravine in Ticino, the Italian part of Switzerland. One could not see the place from the small untravelled road, and had to go down a steep dirt drive to get…
I’ve never understood why anyone would revile a bright yellow flower, like a sunburst shining up smiling from the ground! Whose tap root goes deep enough to aerate the soil; who is tough enough to brave cold and spring frost to bring much-needed vitamins to those same ungrateful folks! Get…
Every stern thing we think or say about another has its roots in our own dissatisfaction. The mirror is perfect: as outside, so inside. What would it be like if we trusted other people enough to let them go? By ‘trust’ I don’t mean ‘approve of’ or ‘Oh, I know…
As I wrote in my last post, Suppose There is No Armageddon, I threatened my teenaged niece with the specter of reading the aforementioned poem to her if she continued telling me about apocalyptic dooms a-coming. This got me thinking… and by evening I was guffawing, all by myself, with…
This poem visited me insistently over a period of weeks, demanding that I write down the stanzas even in the middle of the night, in the dark, on a pad I kept on my bedside stand. I had become fed up with cries of doom I’d been hearing from many…
You know how when you’re hiking and you come over a rise and see below you a lake – as flat as gravity can make it, blue-lit by the sky; edges fringed with summer-leaved trees? And the very waterness of it, its placidity, the surprise: and something in you relaxes…
Sunday Soapbox: The Town Center Every town needs a center, a central square, a plaza – just as all old towns used to have, and in many parts of the world still do. Just as every person needs a center, and every atom has a center. Towns without centers make…
Today I Killed My Bank Account Today I killed my bank account It had kept on biting me Indifferent tellers riding on its camel back Numbers jumble me like bad backass dreams I find in my alphabet soup So I took revenge I don’t pay rent,…
Sneezelight Next time you have to sneeze, just Think about the top of your head, Just Focus on the top of your head Keep focusing! Through all temptation stay Right faithful to The top of your head The sneeze will lift up like a…