Click this to open Sammi’s page where you’ll find more fun prose and poems run amok.
Small Battles: Big Wars
We
would rather f-bomb
or recite angry litanies
of forbidden witchery
than speak the word: cancer.
It’s when few of one’s
trillions of cells run amok,
it’s a war fought with
knives, rads, and poisons.
Look both ways to see your own beginning and end.
Mind the gaps, fight the battle, die with dignity.
John Updike, best known, perhaps, as a novelist, was a poet. This short poem of his is one of my favorites regarding life and death. He died of lung cancer in 2009.
For Yom Kippur and the first week of October release, our wonderful server, Mistress Rochelle, and boss lady of Friday Fictioneers has selected a David Stewart dining room photo from her menu and served up a challenge for us to roast some fine micro or flash stories of fewer than 101 words long.
Please read mine below but click on David’s pic to be seated at Rochelle’s perfect purple blog café where you may order up some artful items. We try to abide by and to play nice as we swim in our own creative lanes.
I have nothing at all to sell.
Or to trade.
I walk alone because
we must.
It’s just me
with my own thoughts,
maybe music or a book,
as I deal with some pain.
A good thing,
claim my many doctors.
Not the pain—the dealing with it.
I like the thought of it—alone time,
but it’s not. Not really.
The Universe, also not for sale,
is with me. Always with us.
I call it being alone
because it makes me feel good,
but I know
I am never totally on my own,
without a piece of eternity
talking some quid pro quo.
Look both ways when dealing, feeling, or logrolling.
Mind the gaps between your steps and use the poles lest you fall and break your nose.
Click the superimpose graphic to link up with other excellent wordsmith 56 wonders.
Contemplative Satisfaction
My memories are superimposed,
each one over the others,
repeating forgotten things
like reflections in a window
to my past.
The sights, sounds, and sensed emotions
I can no longer feel, hopes and desires
of mine in a younger man’s clothes
when I danced and played
not knowing about the treasures
that are my memories today.
Look both ways and overlay the tastes and aromas of each memory.
Mind the gaps of confusion as you look through lost time for meanings as we live into the answers to past questions.
For our October’s eve challenge, Mistress Rochell has worked her magic of Friday Fictioneer redux by reviving a past portraiture of her own. It’s a busy time of year for our illustrious maven.
Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, commenced at sundown this past Sunday, marking a time of the high holy days. Soon to follow will be Yom Kippur, then Sukkot.
Click on the picture of Rochelle’s lamps to be magically whisked to her blog page where her cauldron formula for fewer than 100-word stories can be realized.
This poem was rendered to meet today’s dVerse challenge offered by Paeansunplugged from Delhi. We are to write about the good and evil in mere mortals, the good in evil and/or the evil in good. For me, at no time is that enigma more profound than in times of war and battle.
Conundrum War
One story I’ve never told,
a confession…
if evil were evil enough,
if good were good enough,
I would simply tap a secret reservoir of courage…
but courage, too, has finite quantities,
yet it offers hope and grace to the repetitive coward.
I can’t fix my mistakes.
Once people are dead, I can’t make them undead…
killing and dying are not my special province.
Am I too good for this war?
Too smart, too compassionate, too everything?
I’m above it. It’s a mistake, maybe.
Look both ways at good and evil or take Hamlet’s advice and think it so.
Mind the gaps between and within our perceptions of what is better and what is truth.
Everything
I say and do,
makes me,
according to some
(hope not you),
sexist, racist, communist,
capitalist, atheist, and/or —
something else bad-ist,
or worse,
and so on.
The epithet “snowflake” implies
a melting softness, unlike icicle, and is both
insulting and a grounded gauntlet challenge.
I’m being verbally shoehorned in
by short-sighted, narrow thinking
like an ugly foot that doesn’t fit.
I could well
go off with my own difficult ways,
and face my personal world
for the rest of my days,
and forget to fit
their stereotypical clichés,
which some seem hardened
to claim that I always am.
That would be
such a great blow
to the cause
of human equality.
Since then,
all will see
and we will all be:
collective assholes,
magnificent they and
malevolent me.
Look both ways if you intend to make anything better.
Mind the gaps, saps, and crap chaps and be who you are—the real you.
For the last full day of global top-half summer, our waving but unwavering maven of history’s mysteries, Rochelle, has boxed-up a deal with Alicia Jamtaas. That duet has flat-out challenged our fictioneer muses to contrive artful `songs or stories of fewer than 101 words. I don’t think titles or postscripts count, lest she DQ’s me.
Click any box, bike, or item in Alicia’s photo and UPS will pick you up and creatively deliver you to Rochelle’s post of purple passions to open the what-ifs and where-how’s of joining the fray.
Since the American government still had an active conscription/draft system, I enlisted during my senior year in high school (1964). I eventually went to college after four years in the U.S. Air Force, which would later result in my first of three closely related “career” choices.
In May of ’66, I married Yolonda. More than half of our first two years together were spent as 20/21/22-year-olds living and working in Ankara, Turkey. I was not sent to Viet Nam. Happy Honeymoon.
I started college in September of 1968, as one of what would become known as Vietnam Era Veterans. I registered as a sophomore transfer from the University of Maryland, Overseas Division.
The Viet Nam War was raging and nearing its high-point years. LBJ was about finished. The Tet Offensive had hardened much more of U.S. public opinion against the war. While not ambivalent, I disagreed with both sides of the argument at that time. I was confused, as were many Americans. I had two short term goals: graduate and get a job. Yolonda was the Brazos County Attorney’s Secretary at the time. Every cop in the county knew her.
We lived in “on campus” student housing. Our “home” was a small one bedroom, one bath, unairconditioned apartment in southeast, central Texas. We eventually bought and installed a window a/c unit.
The campus library was my retreat, a place to read, study, and to people-watch. At the time, everyone exiting the building was forced to have their possessions searched to prevent theft.
One evening, Yolonda waited for me at that library while I was part of a psych department research study. I found her waiting in our car. She asked me if I would know if my penis was exposed out of my pants. She had been cock-flashed by a student employee. The perv got busted, and we’ve been sharing the experience for fifty-plus years. They are everywhere.
I’m writing this while sitting comfortably, sipping coffee, and eating a pastry from my public library’s coffee bar. These days book checkout is on the honor system, and nobody is searched.
I still like libraries. I am not a prodigious reader, although I read every day. Libraries are strangely comforting to me even though everyone has access to the facility, library card or not. Libraries are what they are and do what they do. The same is true of people.
My first library from childhood was in an old, mid-19th century, church building and still is. I also like old church architecture. Maybe there is a reason for my library/church juxtaposition of interest. I recall no pervs in the stacks from back then, but if those books could talk… (wait, we have talking books nowadays.)
Computer stations at the Central Branch of the Osterhout Free Library
It seems like it began for this boomer with the assassination of JFK. My first ten years after high school, the sixties, and early seventies, were a coming-of-age time for me and a tumultuous period in American History.
More than fifty years later, I still like to sit in libraries and write, read, search for books, people watch, and sip coffee. I may ponder what others say or claim. I think about how differently we all see the world and each other.
But at this point in my life, I really don’t give a shite what anyone thinks of me, except for Yolonda and our three middle-aged kids; less so, a few teeny-bopper or early 20s grandkids.
So far, I think I pass muster. Sort of.
Bill
Look both ways for what is right. Arguing does little good.
Mind the gaps lest they become crevasses of civil division.
Find your tribe and take a side. Keep trying to understand.
Support public libraries, not book bans or burns.
Our Literary Journey 