Deep
A gathering
of pelicans:
now that’s a lot
of throat.
A Snooks Eaglin kind of day (song).
Sometimes you try to go to a yoga class and it doesn’t work, and sometimes the poem you’re working on is about dead people, and sometimes the day is foggy, all on the same day, and also sometimes you are me, but not most of the time. Sing it to me, Snooks.
Damn it feels good to have a sideyard.
The sideyard was better than ever before
The sideyard, according to a new neighbor-friend named Neil “felt like the 60s again.”
The sideyard had around 70 people attend which is record-breaking for the sideyard
The sideyard had a tiki torch
The sideyard had such good loud music that the police came
The sideyard thanks “Tendrils,” the new house band, who will perform acoustically from here on out so that we don’t get evicted
According to a girl I met, the sideyard was “the most fun event I’ve ever been to.” EVER!
Neighbor and friend Jed said about the sideyard, “Don’t ever let me miss this again.”
The sideyard offered free wine and decaffeinated coffee
The morning after the sideyard I had both a real hangover as well as a happiness hangover
Thank you to everyone who came to the sideyard
Thank you to everyone who let themselves enjoy something so analog
Thank you to everyone for coming out to hear poetry; we poets need you, we poets are you, we are all poets
(photos by misha marston johnson)
I sideyard, you sideyard, we all go to the SIDEYARD
featuring the debut of the house band!
featuring flowers by ellie!
featuring “friends of the sideyard,” a group of loosely or not-at-all affiliated people who always come over to the sideyard!
featuring beer and wine if you bring it!
featuring foods also if you bring them!
featuring handmade arts for sale!
featuring poems spoken out loud!
be there or be square or be one of those people I love who lives very far away and can’t be there!
Pumpkin time (photograph).
In the east, there is autumn.
Poem I need these days (Mary Oliver).
The Journey
One day you finally knew
what you had to do, and began,
though the voices around you
… kept shouting
their bad advice–
though the whole house
began to tremble
and you felt the old tug
at your ankles.
“Mend my life!”
each voice cried.
But you didn’t stop.
You knew what you had to do,
though the wind pried
with its stiff fingers
at the very foundations,
though their melancholy
was terrible.
It was already late
enough, and a wild night,
and the road full of fallen
branches and stones.
But little by little,
as you left their voices behind,
the stars began to burn
through the sheets of clouds,
and there was a new voice
which you slowly
recognized as your own,
that kept you company
as you strode deeper and deeper
into the world,
determined to do
the only thing you could do–
determined to save
the only life you could save.
Confessional poetry (mine).
Confession #17
I’m hard of healing
An Exercise in Love (poem) (Diane Di Prima).
An Exercise in Love
for Jackson Allen
My friend wears my scarf at his waist
I give him moonstones
He gives me shell & seaweeds
He comes from a distant city & I meet him
We will plant eggplants & celery together
He weaves me cloth
Many have brought the gifts
I use for his pleasure
silk, & green hills
& heron the color of dawn
My friend walks soft as a weaving on the wind
He backlights my dreams
He has built altars beside my bed
I awake in the smell of his hair & cannot remember
his name, or my own.
-Diane Di Prima
First pomegranate of the season (poem) (mine).
Perhaps
life is waiting for us
elsewhere
all red and nestled.
panache, perhaps 