Category: Uncategorized

Anything can happen.

I remember my daughter telling me this. It was after the apartment next to hers in Palm Springs blew up in the middle of the night. She’d been in her new place just a few days, unwittingly moving next door to a meth lab. So it blew up and there was fire and fire trucks and her escape from harm and her call from a phone booth across the street from her apartment.

It was three in the morning when the phone rang. It rang and rang out in the hallway of our old beach house on Lake Superior. It was a phone that sat on a tiny table, the way phones used to do when they functioned as family anchors. I got out of bed, searching for a light I didn’t need, wasting time. Stalling. No one calls at three in the morning to sell…

There are times in my family’s life that are never spoken of. Hard times, rough patches. Every family with any substance, especially families that have taken on the challenge of growing by adoption, has had these times. I don’t trust families who’ve had just smooth sailing and can’t manage their way around a police station or an inpatient unit. I joke. Somewhat.

When there is a hard time or, say, a great disappointment, it can be an estranging thing. One generally doesn’t want to be around people who disappoint them or anger them or, maybe the worst of all, puzzle and confound them. So we withdraw and protect ourselves. It’s a reflex more than a strategy. This can happen even while the two people are in the same house, but it’s easy as pie when they’re under separate roofs, when you have to go out of your way to see…

The march in St. Augustine, Florida began on the east side of the Bridge of Lions and ended with a rally on the grounds of the Castillo de San Marcos.

#Vote2018

If we come out of this Trump blip in history with a lesson learned it will be that everything is connected. Trump/Russia is a tree with many branches.

Chaos is the flower bud on the Trump/Russia tree, and Trump thrives on chaos, or he claims to. The White House has been in a constant state of it since he took office, and Trump is playing the “I meant to do that” game.

Russians grew Trump. At root, he owes them money but, that scary mob of axe wielding thugs has something else over him, and they use it to control him.

Since chaos is a flower on the Trump/Russia tree, the fruit must be fear. Putin punishes mistakes and disloyalty.

Case in point— Sergei Skripal, a former Soviet spy, who had been cooperating with investigators, is hospitalized in critical condition after being exposed to an unknown substance in the UK…

Too often I see the elderly talking, instead of listening. They -just like me- think they know it all and they are so eager to spread their wisdom, regardless if wanted or unwanted. 

If We Burn

What flares instead to replace our
privileged nights? And which

assemblage of words could reorder these
deaths into comprehension,

change I can’t breathe from epitaph
to actuated plea for help?

Are words ever enough?
Can we stack our indifference and fear

into a mile-high pyre, and torching it
watch them rise to nothingness,

disappearing through the clouds
into the streaming light of cold, dark stars?

Raise your hands and sing. Blow softly
upon the ember. Inhale and recall.

Do you still feel? Will you breathe?
Every fire needs oxygen.

* * *

“If We Burn” first appeared on this blog in December, 2014. It’s also included in my chapbook, If Your Matter Could Reform.