I Must Hold Back

In Three Word Wednesday Thom offers us

Eject; verb: Force or throw (something) out, typically in a violent or sudden way; cause (something) to drop out or be removed, usually mechanically; compel (someone) to leave a place.

Impact; noun: The action of one object coming forcibly into contact with another; the effect or influence of one person, thing, or action, on another; verb: Come into forcible contact with another object.

Render; verb: Provide or give (a service, help, etc.); cause to be or become; make; represent or depict artistically; melt down (fat).

Etymology
Eject came to English during the Middle English renditions (rendition means state of being rendered :D) of the Latin heritage, more or less directly from the Latin "ejectus" from "jacere"=to throw, thus "e-jacere"="out-to throw, or to throw out" with a back meaning "with some force".

Impact is a more modern borrowing also from Latin, a conjugation of "impingere". Thus there is a marriage between "impinge" and "impact", where "impinge" carries senses that one imposes while "impact" is more like a blow with the back meaning that all the impositions collapse and are viewed all at once in a single act.

Renderis the oldest word, perhaps, and traces from Middle English through Middle French to a split source, the Vulgate Latin "rendere" and the Latin "prendere" = red + dare. All meaning to give back, in part or parts. This stream of etymology connects with PREHENSILE, DATE, and DO.

I Must Hold Back

Your full impact is
(despite my view of your fine
slick form before me)
impotent.

Render
my desire as you will, love.

So long as you act
with delicacy,
your touch on my scattered parts
will not eject me
beyond our dreamy
world where gods and goddesses
play at creation.

Spider Bite

This poster taken from a post on a blog called entitled "this is premium writing, no?" The post is entitled "mundane murakami"

"Everybody's born with some different thing at the core of their existence. And that thing, whatever it is, becomes like a heat source that runs each person from the inside. I have one too, of course. Like everybody else. But sometimes it gets out of hand. It swells or shrinks inside me, and it shakes me up. What I'd really like to do is find a way to communicate that feeling to another person." - Haruki Murakami

Haruki Murakami (born January 12, 1949) is a Japanese writer and translator. His works of fiction and non-fiction have garnered him critical acclaim and numerous awards, including the Franz Kafka Prize and Jerusalem Prize among others. He is considered an important figure in postmodern literature. The Guardian praised him as "among the world's greatest living novelists" for his works and achievements.

Haruki Murakami's Signature

"Spider Bite" is the latest in the current cycle happening here and on The Waxing Moon

Spider Bite

So yes, it explodes
and yes, I slap you down or
you do me the same,
a damn big shit storm
and I surely hate how you
keep wrecking my high
but I know you went
back there and I'll go soon too,
you waiting for me
in the web you weave
and me all willing again
because it's weird how
it turns all my fault
after I think about things.
God, I love you so.

‎October ‎4, ‎2011 1:45 PM

By the way, I have another poem entitled "Spider Bite" which I posted some time ago. There was a lively discussion on that one. Go here.

The Best One

A mean streak is running through things. There is a cycle of poems from the street happening. I have a poet partner and friend named Rachel who runs a blog called The Waxing Moon. Go there and read the comments too to catch the whole thing. This is the best part of being a poet on the internet, I think.

Rachel lives up in Whitehorse in the Yukon Territory of Canada. I guess we both have seen the streets. I happen to know that neither of us live like this, not for a long time. No girl has ever knocked me to my knees. One woman drove me down there screaming in pain by saying she was going to leave me behind. That happened in 2000. I saw a man, a screwed up husband knock his wife down one time, she in a leg cast, this after he had knocked me down. I was actually innocent of any bad behavior. I don't know what all has happened in Rachel's life but I have a feeling she's been there. But right now we are both poets and often sympatico. She started something and I have replied and then she replied and I have replied again with this one.

The Best One

Knocked to my damn knees
and scraped along the gravel,
tore my pants big time.
Who would think Junebug
could do that to me again?
You'd think I would learn
even though this is good
goddamn dope from the honest
dealer down the street.
Don't change my mind though.
She's still my best bitch.

Written October 3, 2011 7:30 PM

The Cost Of It All

The Winged Elephant courtesy Tess at Willow Manor

If you go to Magpie #85 you can link to the others from there and should you choose to accept the assignment, you can play too. Here is your link: Magpie Tales: Mag 85

There is always a price to pay, no matter what you do. When all of the costs, small and large, physical and metaphysical, are gathered together in the center ring of the circus, it may not only be pigs but elephants and people who learn to fly. At the heart of things for me lies a grief that cannot abate. The entertainment value rises, however, at the gatherings of the like minded once their souls align.

The Cost Of It All

When the elephant
last flew many people were
despondent at not
having wings as well
as the exalted vision
assigned to fliers
of the pachyderm
persuasion.

That view felt like
a reduction in
the cost of it all
though the clear stated price was
a wee loss of love.

Written for Magpie Tales No. 85
October 2, 2011 9:36 AM

It Is Too Soon

This photo found *here* (click on this) at Behance Network

"The truth is you already know what it's like. You already know the difference between the size and speed of everything that flashes through you and the tiny inadequate bit of it all you can ever let anyone know. As though inside you is this enormous room full of what seems like everything in the whole universe at one time or another and yet the only parts that get out have to somehow squeeze out through one of those tiny keyholes you see under the knob in older doors. As if we are all trying to see each other through these tiny keyholes.

"But it does have a knob, the door can open. But not in the way you think. The truth is you've already heard this. That this is what it's like. That it's what makes room for the universes inside you, all the endless inbent fractals of connection and symphonies of different voices, the infinities you can never show another soul. And you think it makes you a fraud, the tiny fraction anyone else ever sees? Of course you're a fraud, of course what people see is never you. And of course you know this, and of course you try to manage what part they see if you know it's only a part. Who wouldn't? It's called free will, Sherlock. But at the same time it's why it feels so good to break down and cry in front of others, or to laugh, or speak in tongues, or chant in Bengali - it's not English anymore, it's not getting squeezed through any hole.

"So cry all you want, I won't tell anybody." - David Foster Wallace, Oblivion

David Foster Wallace (February 21, 1962 – September 12, 2008) was an American author of novels, essays, and short stories, and a professor at Pomona College in Claremont, California. He was widely known for his 1996 novel Infinite Jest, which Time included in its All-Time 100 Greatest Novels list (covering the period 1923–2006). Los Angeles Times book editor David Ulin called Wallace "one of the most influential and innovative writers of the last 20 years". Wallace's unfinished novel, The Pale King, was published in 2011. A biography of Wallace by D. T. Max is projected for publication in 2012.

I don't know why but I have witnessed apocalyptic visions rise in me this week. I have mentioned certain aspects of it already here and there. I think something big is coming in the scientific realm very soon, based on stirrings in the science news this week. Other things are happening, like it appears both Mexico and Guatemala are releasing for publication by certain archeologers material which may build a yet stronger case for alien visitations to the Maya from somewhere. Overt change is afoot, or so it seems to me.

It Is Too Soon

I cannot come back
home to you from this outpost
on the far far edge
of the western lands.
This is my latest exile.

I walk the new shore
God created here,
shook out last Thursday morning,
looking for any
life at all, any
faint hint that it will arise
but it is too soon.

December 23, 2009   8:35 AM

The Ravens Call

A Raven

John Daido Loori

"The problem is that people don't understand what enlightenment is. People see it as something other than who they are. They're looking for some kind of perfection that's almost dehumanized. The Buddha was very much a real person, a living person. Sometimes he did things that were not very enlightened, like not initially ordaining women. The perfection is to be found in the ability to keep working at it, and keep correcting yourself when you go astray. Keep returning to what it means to be human.

We have human qualities that are amazing. We have such things as integrity, and persistence, and dedication, and honor and love. There are also things like anger and delusion, separation and so on. These are also human qualities. Practice is about learning how to discern them. It doesn't mean that an enlightened person never gets angry. What happens is that over a period of time anger becomes less self-centered. It's more like the anger of a mother who has just yanked her child off a busy road. That kind of anger is for the benefit of the child. That's why they say the other side of anger is wisdom." - John Daido Loori

The Ravens Call

A friend, more than friends,
ravens cry the world into
being, shot with light,
unearthly halo
of rainbow light, wisdom spread
clear across the sweep
of this universe
that holds you and me upright
and breathing after
all's said and all done.

December 22, 2009 5:08 PM

The Pressure Is The Same

Love As Nausea

This week's words by Thom at 3 Word Wednesday: click here
Cherish, guarantee, nausea

Click on the link and see what the others did with this triangle...

Love As Nausea

I know I promised.
Cherish you, that's what you asked
of me as if you
had the holy right
to ask a true guarantee
standing like oak trees
year after year, dry
dusty green with mistletoe
high up in branches.

I drank your strange tea
steeped with unknowns. Odd half truths
like gunpowder pills
revealed gobs of goo
hidden within their thin shells.
Now I must vomit.

written September 28, 2011 5:08 AM

Author's note: this is a story and does not point fingers at your or anyone else, okay?

Not How I Like It

There is a big difference between having the stones for clandestine love and actually liking it. I have done my time more than once. In my youth I fell in love with a woman who was in the last of her marriage to a young man who thought he was going to hit in a rock and roll band. We connected and for the most part she was careful and did not allow us to actually make love much. It was not a secret though. He knew I was trying to take his wife. He knew she would leave him in any case, with me or no. She was older than him, older than me too by a little bit. She had tried for a ride on the rock and roll train. That one was a couple years long until my life blew up in a wholly different way that tore me out of it and on to another universe. At that same time she finally found the energy to sever her ties with that sad young man, who had lost his rock and roll dream and his wife to boot. That all finished in 1972. Rod Stewart was singing Maggie May at the time. I would sing it to her just to watch her temper flare. She was a little sensitive about her age.

"...the sun in your face really shows your age -
that don't bother me none, to me you're everything!"

From 1972 to 1999 - married and a career begun, moving to another state and moving twice more within that state following work - illness and divorce and financial distress - and then after more than a dozen dry years I met my lady of the moon and she swept me into orbit around the possibility of miracle. But really because of my long ago experience and many other eye openers, I knew we would not last but also that if I was to experience the gift it would have to be whole hearted and beyond that even. So that is where I went. She too was married. She too was divorcing. But in this case there was a secret and so were we also very low profile. This was necessarily clandestine, and with some help it remained that way. My dozen dry years came to an end and I returned to a vibrancy I had forgotten for longer than those dozen years. She was the third of my adult romances and in her way yet further confirmation that my heart doesn't choose all that well. Along with so many of us, I have what some call a broken picker.

After two years of romance and clandestine discipline she pushed me away. She could do nothing else. I have never condemned her.

Not How I Like It

You said I like it
naughty and I do but not
so far out of sight
nor sneaking around
nor having to tell stories
of staying home when
I've been doing her,
not that sort of thing, don't like
that at all, no ma'am.

December 20, 2009 7:11 PM

Relativity

In honor of those faster than light neutrinos who give some scientists pause. In honor of scientists I read of today who have pointed out that placental mammal genes governing the gestation of fetuses internally are a complex of relationships which entered the evolving stream all at once somehow. Something big is on the horizon now that the tags of earlier human migrations (not us but our earlier, older relatives) figure deeply in the experience of all of southeast asia, reaching all the way into Australia, but not universally, in a patchwork. Some here but not there, and all of that not the newer Asian strains of humanity that are the present inheritors of China and Japan, Korea and Mongolia. The southern migration path is definite now, and it met with Denisovan man and interbred. Denisovans left Africa much earlier even than the early homo sapien migration, and the men who became modern Asians in a later second migration from Africa. Something is stirring and we are learning ever more quickly what the state of our plight is.

I have begun in recent years a prayer discipline that touches on this in a personal way. I hope you will too.

Relativity

Einstein’s desk released
the muse from the cage Newton
built of gravity.
This computer screen
has taken light speed to its
limit and reversed
the thrust of tachyons,
tearing spacetime’s thin fabric
in my bright fierce love.

December 19, 2009 11:25 PM

How We Are These Days

A few weeks back Tess posted a picture that featured a red umbrella. This picture of a woman in the rain that Tess has posted seems to tie to that one. I immediately knew I would speak from the avian perspective. For links to the offerings of my talented friends I invite you to go to Magpie Tales, Mag 84. You can do so by clicking on this link if you don't already have another easy way.

I live my life in many worlds. The world of dream and fantasy is near to me and my path meanders there. The world of magic calls to me from somewhere inside the boundaries of my person. Sometimes I am sure I can evoke a glamour. I am an engineer and technician by training and career, as well as a psychologist and philosopher by education and experience. I live with the Denisovans and with the Neanderthal genes within me (2-1/2% I am lately told) and also in the playgrounds of bosons and fermions and the quarks beneath. Just this week I traveled 20 parts in a million times faster than the speed of light with neutrinos, and did so 15000 times. That's a big but preliminary announcement coming from Italian researchers connected with CERN. I travel to the limits of things and ponder the dark matter and dark energy there (and here) that is 95% of everything. I live alone, though a cat visits me daily. Most days I meet with a varying crowd of people in a venue where we often share intimacies we would not tell our families. On the down side, I know the people who support me medically rather too well and I have very little reason to visit with my bankers. Oh yes, and you are in my life.

How We Are These Days

You speak of leaving
behind the red umbrella
I gave you last year.
You show me your form
beneath the rainy cling
of your thinning garb.

You seem to wear less
these days as if pressed to strip -
as if the global
warming was a fact
and current or else as if
you have those flashes.

I am better by
your side in a smaller shape,
your crow familiar.

written today, September 25, 2011 9:51 AM

The Alternative

I am struggling with energy after a full work week. This has gotten ordinary for me. I understand why some guys my age retire, and I have only two months before my "legal" retirement age of 66. I have physical conditions. I have a large pharmacy in my home meaning a good many foreign chemicals in my body to control blood pressure, cholesterol, blood clots, diabetic issues, water retention and prostate issues. That pharma has to affect me. Furthermore, I have absolutely nothing to prove out there on the planet any more. By the end of any work day I am fairly spent. By weeks end I am more than that and feel rather desperate. I am not looking for sympathy. I have absolutely "earned" every bit of this, including the fact that I cannot financially seriously consider retirement. Whatever. My condition is still basically middle class, though at the low end of it and not even that if I was trying to support more than myself. That is not true for so many. There is no question that the middle class is disappearing as the world returns to the way things always have been. It is not natural for people who have much to think even a little about the great majority of people who have little. This is not even reprehensible it is so natural, but it is a matter for great grief. If we actually try to force the issue as the idealist communists did, we only succeed in creating great institutional evil. Coercion of any sort in any situation almost never works permanently.

The Alternative

Solitude's magic
is my delight - far from drab
days spent as I must
at corporate desks
beneath the florescent glare
of ordinary
tasks for gray old pay.
In solitude's song I fly,
gone to other worlds.

December 19, 2009 11:02 PM

In The Stones And Sand

The rain in the distance never comes near

Yesterday it came up again. Once before someone asked, "shouldn't your poems stand alone? Why would you try to tell the reader what to do, how to understand?" Yet musicians and writers and dramatists and painters actually do this in subtle and not so subtle ways all the time. I don't think a work stands alone ever. There is always a context. My new friend asked me why I included the word definitions and in that post the answer is very simple, because it was easier to copy Thom's Three Word Wednesday list than to rewrite it. I don't worry about things like that. My blog form is usually some kind of prose to compare and contrast with the poem. Most often these days the prose is not really that much mine but belongs to the anonymous Wiki contributor or some other remarkable web site. I don't intend this site to be solely poetry. I do hope that there is connection between the prose and the poem if only in a meander but this time maybe not.

I lived in West Texas in the second grade. I have a few strong memories, the impetigo I caught, the horny toads I killed (shame), the ants and desert scrub of the native yard out back, the trailer we lived in, the chinchilla cages my grandfather used, but oddly not the chinchillas he raised, the cab of the truck on the day I visited the construction site because mom said I could if dad said and dad said I could if mom said so I said they both said...I got in trouble for that one, when I caught the inside of my left leg near the knee and tore a big flap of skin open (I still have the scar), some drawings I did, how happy I was to go back to California, though we stayed in Gardena before coming all the way back to Berkeley, Ca where we started from. We moved into the back apartment in the house next door to the upstairs apartment in the house we had moved out from. In our new kitchen was a cooler made of wire mesh to the outside on the bottom and a door to close like any other cubboard, but down low to the floor of course.



In The Stones And Sand

The dry ache of things
on this slope I walk, stumble
over hidden stones
beneath the drab sand
looking for signs of life, you.

No stone is unturned
in this search of mine,
no stone left to sit as is
except those too big
like the stone I have
in my torn and sandy heart,
in my arid soul.

December 18, 2009 7:55 PM

Why I Wrote This Poem

Salmon Migration

Salmon is the common name for several species of fish in the family Salmonidae. Several other fish in the same family are called trout; the difference is often said to be that salmon migrate and trout are resident, but this distinction does not strictly hold true. Salmon live along the coasts of both the North Atlantic (one migratory species Salmo salar) and Pacific Oceans (approximately a dozen species of the genus Oncorhynchus), and have also been introduced into the Great Lakes of North America. Salmon are intensively produced in aquaculture in many parts of the world.

Typically, salmon are anadromous: they are born in fresh water, migrate to the ocean, then return to fresh water to reproduce. However, there are populations of several species that are restricted to fresh water through their life. Folklore has it that the fish return to the exact spot where they were born to spawn; tracking studies have shown this to be true, and this homing behavior has been shown to depend on olfactory memory.

Over at Three Word Wednesday (click on the link to see the other offerings) Thom offered
Dull; adjective: Lacking interest or excitement; lacking brightness, vividness, or sheen; (of a person) slow to understand; stupid; verb: Make or become dull or less intense.

Race; noun: A competition between runners, horses, vehicles, boats, etc., to see which is the fastest in covering a set course; each of the major divisions of humankind, having distinct physical characteristics; verb: Compete with another or others to see who is fastest at covering a set course or achieving an objective; move or progress swiftly or at full speed.

Yawn; verb: involuntarily open one's mouth wide and inhale deeply due to tiredness or boredom; noun: A reflex act of opening one's mouth wide and inhaling deeply due to tiredness or boredom.

This poem insisted on going its own way. I did not write this one. It wrote itself. Every significant word and frame choice of mine was scratched and replaced, some more than once before I was permitted to complete the work.

Why I Wrote This Poem

Words are fish. Now I
need to learn to surf your love.

Words migrate upstream.
They race against time
and then with wild leaps they flash
past dull stone meaning
passing into realms
of verve and élan and weave
all bright around me.

Then even my yawn
turns incandescent within
your love’s tidal bore.

September 21, 2011 12:48 PM

1000 poems

I have just noticed that the number of poems listed in my "posted" directory has topped one thousand. Since I have been reprising earlier poems for some time I am certain it is accurate to say that I have posted over one thousand poems. Blogger says that I have 946 posts - 947 counting this one. In the early days I was posting two poems daily. I have 405 poems in the queue. :D This might be a life work. Found it. Find yours.

Changing For The Better

Your Bright Eyes

Metamorphosis is a biological process by which an animal physically develops after birth or hatching, involving a conspicuous and relatively abrupt change in the animal's body structure through cell growth and differentiation. Some insects, amphibians, molluscs, crustaceans, Cnidarians, echinoderms and tunicates undergo metamorphosis, which is usually accompanied by a change of habitat or behavior.

Scientific usage of the term is exclusive, and is not applied to general aspects of cell growth, including rapid growth spurts. References to "metamorphosis" in mammals are imprecise and only colloquial, but historically idealist ideas of transformation and monadology, as in Goethe's Metamorphosis of Plants, influenced the development of ideas of evolution.

Sometimes changes really are radical. Some of us know this to be fact. Metamorphosis may be emotionally precise to the nearly overnight change that can happen to the human heart.

The love of one drunk for another is like this sometimes.

Changing For The Better

In reaching to scratch
the itch on my blade I felt
the seam's sudden split
and it spilled out new.

I am born of this young wing,
born of wind and love,
born of yearning breath,
of voice and of your bright eyes,
the way you touch me.

December 18, 2009 8:42 AM

Last Heard From

The Snake Charmer, Henri Rousseau, 1907

When I was a young man, having returned from a two year drug induced exile in East Pakistan (now Bangladesh), I started back to school at university in San Jose, California. The year was 1969. Things were popping and people were interested in changing the world in ways fresh and new then but familiar to us all now. I began in a rooming house but soon met my friend down the street. It was not long before I moved in there when the old dining room became available as a bed room. This was the quintessential college dope house. The students were serious enough that people were going to graduate and they did, though I did not. When I left this third run at a college education behind it was not bad grades that stopped me. My friend was serious about funding his schooling and he chose to deal to do it. So did I, both on my own and also with him. He hooked up with a guy back from Viet Nam, a veteran who decided to get even more serious. That was my friend's main partner. My friend and this guy had the capital to buy a boat and started to smuggle in pot from the Mexican groups but before that we were transporting their dope up from LA.

The way to make any money in those days, you had to move volume because otherwise you would party up all the profit. Also, you had to do it with elaborate protection schemes of the kind the Vet had devised for himself. He was virtually inaccessible without an invitation and from a bar, which was a successful out of town music venue he supplied parts of the San Francisco music scene. He lived in the Santa Cruz mountains, more than fifty miles from the city. This was of course the hey day of that whole scene. Or if you did not protect yourself that way you got in and got out and then stopped for unpredictable lengths of time. When the vet was last heard from he had retired and bought his sea going sail boat. It is not true that no one succeeded at the business. His goal had been to sail the world. My friend had much less elaborate goals. He succeeded too.

Many years before him, Henri Rousseau painted scenes like the one above. Wiki says:

Henri Julien Félix Rousseau (May 21, 1844 – September 2, 1910) was a French Post-Impressionist painter in the Naive or Primitive manner. He was also known as Le Douanier (the customs officer), a humorous description of his occupation as a tax collector. Ridiculed during his life, he came to be recognized as a self-taught genius whose works are of high artistic quality.

His best known paintings depict jungle scenes, even though he never left France or saw a jungle. Stories spread by admirers that his army service included the French expeditionary force to Mexico are unfounded. His inspiration came from illustrated books and the botanical gardens in Paris, as well as tableaux of taxidermied wild animals. He had also met soldiers, during his term of service, who had survived the French expedition to Mexico and listened to their stories of the subtropical country they had encountered. To the critic Arsène Alexandre, he described his frequent visits to the Jardin des Plantes: "When I go into the glass houses and I see the strange plants of exotic lands, it seems to me that I enter into a dream."

Last Heard From

It is my lagoon
after all, the big reward
of all those risky
times, tree top fliers
and blue gray cigarette boats
all leading to me
here, naked with flute,
black from days at sea and sun
surrounded by snakes
that have slithered out
of my apocalyptic
drug run memories.

September 18, 2011 9:30 AM

Written for Magpie Tales Mag 83 of this date Visit there and delight.

Naked To The Day

I Ching calls the north and east the realm of solitude, appropriate to contemplation, meditation and rest.

This poem was written on an anniversary of my stepfather's birthday.

My Mother and My Step-Father before they
were married, ca. 1951

Robert Henry Hileman, in his youth known as Stormy, was a Marine in WWII, just old enough to get in at the last, landed in Okinawa and was headed to invasion of the main islands when the bomb stopped it all. When Stormy Hileman (he was a football hero on the Cal Rosebowl team of 48 I think it was; then he tried for, almost made a professional slot on the 49ers) got serious about marrying Mom, what tipped it was when I asked if he would be my Daddy. What had happened, my real father had stopped coming to visit when he saw that another man was hanging around. Before then my father would come on Sundays and spend the day with me.

I have no idea what really happened in that two year marriage in which I arrived on the planet. It was my mother's second(...she annulled her first. She also annulled her fourth, and was married five times. She always said she had affinity with Liz Taylor, knew just what Liz was about. If you're going to lay them, you have to marry them.) Near the end of my real father's life we were in contact. I made a small remark about Mom divorcing him and got quite a letter back. His wound after nearly fifty years was still fresh.

My Mother and my Step-Father's Wedding
Picture, 1951

I was a childhood asthmatic and really was pretty sick. This man Stormy married us anyway, what was to be an eighteen year marriage. At the end, I found myself in an awkward position. I was absolutely one of my mother's supports as they divorced. For the first part of it I was her only support, because of our circumstances. I did well enough, I think, but I had to be diplomatic because I completely understood and agreed with my step dad's need to get out.

My step father Stormy was built like the center-linebacker he was and he was a red head, handsome only as some red heads can be, unusually hirsute all over except he was noticeably balding at the age of seventeen. He was born on December 18 in Perry, Oklahoma, and his family came to the Ventura area of California to settle, coming out of the dust bowl, genuine Okies. His mother, Ruth Spurlock, divorced his father, Charles Hileman, who settled into West Texas, there to become a contractor in the oil fields, a man who raised chinchillas at home. Stormy had an older brother, Jack, who became a college professor of chemistry and who had a cabin in Northern California on the Klamath River, I believe it was. One of my step dad's friends and team mates on that Cal championship team was Jackie Jensen, who later had a great career as a Right Fielder with the Boston Red Sox. Another was Leo Nomellini who made it to the 49ers offensive line. Stormy's working life was in the school systems of California and overseas, first as a teacher, then as a school administrator, but he ran afoul of the teacher education system and never got his doctorate. He tried several times. At the end he was a serious computer buff. He died painfully of bone cancer in the early summer of 2001. He has a daughter Caroline and through her two grandchildren, all coming from the family he formed after leaving my mother.

Naked To The Day

And I will join the feast of love,
standing on the brink of things,
feathers catching northeast wind
while my old skin tightens in the air
of this new morning's chill.

December 18, 2009 8:05 AM

All Agree, Free At Last

The Meeting

© 2002-2011 Brian Stewart, Minneapolis, MN

Brian writes: "The Meeting - Minneapolis is blessed with a strong and active sobriety community. It has many good AA Meeting Houses to choose from with meetings most anytime someone needs one. The meeting house I painted here is in South Minneapolis and features the usual cast of characters sharing their experience, strength and hope. The painting portrays the giving of a medallion for another year of sobriety, a very special event in the life of a recovering person."

All Agree, Free At Last
(Oregon City, Oregon)

The round faced short haired
guy at the head table celebrates
ten years sober on this day.

I didn't shake or spill my tea.

The fresh faced short haired
guy across from me is crying
openly because he is going

to jail in less than three hours.

The guy in the corner learned
he can say God and fuck right here
in the same sentence.

He chose to speak of that today.

I will let the wild women
tell their secrets on themselves.
if they want.  They were here too,

and so were other healed and broken hearts.

‎September ‎16, ‎2011 5:17 PM

"I Have a Dream" is a 17-minute public speech by Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered on August 28, 1963, in which he called for racial equality and an end to discrimination. The speech, from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial during the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, was a defining moment of the American Civil Rights Movement. Delivered to over 200,000 civil rights supporters, the speech was ranked the top American speech of the 20th century by a 1999 poll of scholars of public address.

This speech concluded, "Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!" which almost certainly referenced the Negro Spiritual:

Free at last, free at last

I thank God I'm free at last

Free at last, free at last

I thank God I'm free at last

What We Saw Out There

One of the sets of prints in Mungo National Park

From The Sydney Morning Herald

Revealed: the runners of 20,000BC

HUNDREDS of human footprints dating back to about 20,000BC - the oldest in Australia and the largest collection of its kind in the world - have been discovered in Mungo National Park in western NSW.

They were left by children, adolescents and adults at the height of the last ice age as they ran and walked across a moist clay area near the Willandra Lakes.

Some people appear to have been hunting, with one very tall man sprinting at about 20kmh.

The first footprint was spotted by Mary Pappin Junior, of the Mutthi Mutthi people, two years ago and more than 450 more have been uncovered by a team led by Steve Webb of Bond University.

Professor Webb said the find provided a unique glimpse into the lives of those who lived in the arid inland. "It brings these people to life in a way no other archaeological evidence can. You can see how the mud squelched between their toes."

From CNN World

Ancient footprints: Earliest signs of modern feet
FOOTPRINTS

February 26, 2009

Ancient footprints discovered in northern Kenya are believed to be the oldest sign that early humans had feet like ours.

The footprints were found in two sedimentary layers, 1.5 million years old, near Ileret in the eastern African nation.

"These rarest of impressions yielded information about soft tissue form and structure not normally accessible in fossilized bones. The Ileret footprints constitute the oldest evidence of an essentially modern human-like foot anatomy," according to a team of anthropologists who detailed the discovery in the February 27 issue of the journal Science. The team, led by anthropologist Professor John W.K. Harris and an international group of colleagues, excavated the site between 2006 and 2008.

Harris, who teaches at Rutgers University and the State University of New Jersey, is a member of the Center for Human Evolutionary Studies and directs the Koobi Fora Field Project. The ongoing excavation project is run by Rutgers in collaboration with the National Museums of Kenya.

Koobi Fora refers to a region around Koobi Fora Ridge, located on the eastern shore of Lake Turkana. The area has been a rich resource for excavations.

According to the authors of the journal article, there were three footprint trails in the upper sediment layer. Five meters deeper, another sediment surface preserved one trail of two prints and a single, smaller print, likely from a child.

"In these specimens, the big toe is parallel to the other toes, unlike that of apes where it is separated in a grasping configuration useful in the trees. The footprints show a pronounced human-like arch and short toes, typically associated with an upright bipedal stance," the scientists said.

"The size, spacing and depth of the impressions were the basis of estimates of weight, stride and gait, all found to be within the range of modern humans."

The size and other characteristics of the prints led the authors to conclude the prints belonged to the hominid Homo ergaster, or early Homo erectus. This is the first hominid to have had the same body proportions -- longer legs and shorter arms -- as modern Homo sapiens.

Other hominid fossil footprints dating to 3.6 million years ago were discovered in 1978 by Mary Leakey at Laetoli, Tanzania.

"These are attributed to the less advanced Australopithecus afarensis, a possible ancestral hominid. The smaller, older Laetoli prints show indications of upright bipedal posture, but possess a shallower arch and a more ape-like, divergent big toe," the authors said.


What We Saw Out There

What was once lakeshore
is now stony desert floor
and once these footprints
were fresh in the muck
of reeds and bugs, swamp driven
life, hunters, their prey.

Distant family
gone back home, these old footprints
left as if for us
while we cannot leave
our own in ancient silty
dry and dusty stone.

‎September ‎15, ‎2011   3:09 PM