October is my favorite month
after September, until
it is November, which then
becomes my favorite month
before December. Then,
January changes everything and
I begin to dread July—
Which is when I start to yearn
for October again and
I look at the calendar and
I’m fixin’ to bitch about
the miserable Texas heat,
When my wife asks me where
I would like to go and
I answer, anywhere with
air conditioning, or where
it is October and she says,
it’s October now and
91 degrees outside.
I decide to go look
at the thermostat and to
think about Thanksgiving,
a good economy, and global
warming. She refuses to
live where it is cold.
Look both ways, but time is unidirectional
and never stops, until it does.
Gaps in time are cosmic to the mind.
Note: This is my second (Sunday’s) installment for Sammi’s weekend writing prompt: 44 words with twilight as the one-word prompt.
Click to hyperlink to Sammi’s page
***
The Sunday Marathon
Gathered in a crisp morning twilight to sip hot coffee, to gaze upon others ready to contest human limits against nature by running like crazed Greeks: a marathon; some hoping to win, most to finish; others, in their terminal twilight, proving they still can.
***
Look at twilight both ways, one nearing a dawning, the other after dusk,
but before a darkness crosses the veil between life and death.
Mind the gaps, but don’t lose sight of the end-goal.
Aurora, Dawn’s goddess hints
with pink folds and blue
watercolor hue,
soon we’ll sense day’s light,
now neither morning nor night,
feel changes nudging
some clouds for drama.
***
Look both ways at dawn, into the abyss of night and the promise of day and life.
Mind the gaps for special change.
I prefer to write Sammi’s weekend prompt on Sunday. When I looked at it on Friday, I wrote a poem. It just happened: oops, a poem. I decided this weekend’s prompt could be for each day of the weekend, including Friday. My three on replace:
Going Home Again (Friday)
I’ve tried to go back home,
to the place where
I was born.
It was the right place,
but I was not the him who
I was when I left.
I was unable to replace me,
and you weren’t who
you once were.
No longer was I one of you,
not of the same tribe,
only a memory.
Once you leave, it’s done.
You can never go home again,
we can’t go back in time.
What was is finished,
only the whisper of memory
holds us in the past.
***
Irreplaceable Love (Saturday)
If you lose someone you love
you can’t replace them
nor the love you felt.
Each love is unique. It may
change or flat-out die,
but most love remains in us.
We can’t feel so much love
that we wear it out,
like an old pair of shoes.
The love we feel is at least
for as long as one shall live,
I hope all my love lasts forever.
Be it a pet or a person, family
or friend, music or memory,
no love can replace a true love.
***
Relief Strategy (Sunday)
Planning battles, reserves
are replacements,
part of the relief strategy for
casualties and the weary.
In basketball they are the bench,
In football, second string,
baseball has relief pitchers from
the bull pen that replace starters.
My Dad referred to men
as being on relief. Years later,
I learned he meant welfare,
not to replace.
Then there is that personal relief we crave
during difficult or painful times, like in
the Jerry Clower story about coon huntin’—
I been coon huntin’ and lemme tell ya,
it’s just that funny.
***
Look both ways in them Mississippi swamps.
Mind the gaps for Lynx.
*
Jerry Clower’s most famous story was his coon huntin’ story about the time he and his friends went hunting that evolved into an entanglement… if Jerry don’t make you laugh, you need relief. If you got the time, he’s irreplaceable.
Sometimes, when it’s dark
and extremely cold,
you can go outside
into the wash of crystal clean mystery,
of frigid stillness soundlessly
covering your world,
perhaps luck will let you discover
the delicate beauty of freshly falling flakes
of glimmering clean dry ivory snow
seen by streetlights slowly drifting,
like tiny feathers floating down
to find fellows resting
on the ground or drifting
onto your warm hand,
there to melt and vanish,
or you may scoop some up
and with the soft warm vapor of your breath
gently sending angels
of transparent virgin weightless grains
of magic floating freely through
the colorless clean comfort of night.
Look both ways, up and down, mindful of gaps unseen.
Gaius Octavius Thurinus—
Augustus Caesar, got the hot one.
What a shitty deal.
I suck in August, I don’t want to face it.
The heat has gotten banal, too much sun,
too damn hot for the effort of having fun.
Into a whiny puss I turn, give me
the wonder of AC. Make three-digit days
go away. The days and nights just wrap
me into a victim swallowed by the fangs
of the most miserable month of the year.
The best thing about August is September
which is the ninth month, but means seventh.
All my favorite months
have wrong unimaginative
Latin number names.
As seasons transition look both ways and love it, if you can.
Mind the gaps. They may be a Roman mistake.
See it, good and bad, it’s there
but not silent.
Connections have sounds,
vibrations from nature
give pleasantries, threats, and
danger its voice.
Acoustic waves of sound,
perceived in brains
through resonance with timbre.
We hear the soft breezes and roaring
winds perceived as warning,
we hear gentle rains in nature’s
song, and we know the destruction
of the hard driving, relentless torrent.
Quieter or louder, we feel
the sonic texture before our
brains make sense of thunder
and lightning,
before the train passes,
before volcano eruptions
or earth quakes. We hear.
We welcome the pleasantry
of music to our ears, yet we
know the damage of unprotected
loudness, of sonic torture. We
see with our ears, we determine
location, we find friend or foe.
The gift of hearing stands out
not to be assumed as always
there. If no sound is heard,
it did not exist for us.
Without hearing,
our connection with nature is lost.
And maybe with love.
Listen to the rhythm, hear
and feel the music deep inside
your body—then dance.
Dance.
Hear the sounds but see
them mindfully taking mental
shapes—the arts—the senses—
never to be assumed,
never ignored, to be both
cherished and used. Sense all
of life: the sights, sounds,
the tastes and the smells.
Feel the touches of it all
and welcome it until only
the sound of silence
remains.
And a lover’s voice,
listen, hear, love that sound.
Listen, listen, listen; hush.
Look both ways and listen to the sounds.
Hear the drop of rain fall into the distant gap.
Jim was watering his experiment
for his ag doctorate, Grasses of the Brazos.
The good ol’ country boy let his smile show
when I observed and laughed at him
for making a big deal out of a bunch of weeds.
They were not flowers or cash crop plants.
Jim said, without looking at me,
“a weed is just a plant out of place.”
Over fifty years now. Where did they go?
I remember Jim
and his greenhouse full of weeds at A&M,
we’d go spray water on them weeds daily.
Later Jim would defend his dissertation about
Brazos Valley dirt and river bank weeds.
Doctor Jim was a dirt man, agronomist.
Just a plant out of place.
Jim got his Ph and D in dirt.
Then, he moved away to California;
who with his high-pitched, out yonder,
Texas drawl, old Jim
was decreed Doc Jim, the good-old-boy
from Meridian, Texas.
In his own way, he became
a plant out of place.
Many times, I have been a weed,
a person out of place,
or so I felt.
I needed to be in a different place,
to feel unweedly,
wanted by anyone,
or not. Was I where I belonged?
Or, was I just another plant
out of place?
Was I
in the place I was supposed to be?
Bloom where you’re planted,
that’s what they say.
Weeds need to grow everywhere,
but it is nice to find your space.
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