Category: Uncategorized

Mountain/Fish

Mountain range, blue rolling out to the horizon, leaning over to the waters edge, downward into the reflection of sky, water cradles this upthrusting earth, and sun a piercing scintillation over the roof of the world, dancing off the mirror plane of waters. The endless sky full of marching clouds crossing over the foothills. While darkened pools cast silence over rippling fish homes, as they wriggle in the depths, breathing flowing silver, waving fin and tail, hidden from the radar of air dwellers. The skimming waves above the fluid breath of scales, a world, fin-dark and handsome, rolling with mud and shells, and all sounds enhanced through the gleaming pearlight dappling down.

Once Upon a Time in Detroit by Gary Glauber (LANDMARKS Series)

Excellent poem by Gary Glauber “…a widely published poet, fiction writer, teacher, and former music journalist. He champions the underdog while negotiating life’s absurdities. He has three collections — Small Consolations (Aldrich Press), Worth the Candle (Five Oaks Press), and Rocky Landscape with Vagrants (Cyberwit) — as well as two chapbooks, Memory Marries Desire (Finishing Line Press) and The Covalence of Equanimity (SurVision Books), a winner of the 2019 James Tate International Poetry Prize. Another collection, A Careful Contrition (Shanti Arts Publishing). is forthcoming soon.”

Silver Birch Press

carl ballou licensedOnce Upon a Time in Detroit
by Gary Glauber

At 24, I took invincibility in stride,
drunk and still driving a rental car at midnight
into a town I’d never been to before,

heading the sixty miles I needed to cover
in record time and never once worrying about it.
Pointing the sedan in the right direction,

I ate up that random highway’s asphalt miles
like I had been to the feted Motor City
a hundred adventurous times before.

I was driving American, feeling every inch
a patriot of horsepower privilege, a Mitch Ryder song
appropriately blaring from the car’s radio.

I was to be shown how nice this town
with the less-than-stellar rep
could actually be. The gray-haired

officials in their fancy tailored suits
showed up to ensure me major improvements
were currently in the offing.

The impeccable politicians included me
like some wealthy insider, privy to their racist,

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The Problem…

July 22, 2020

This seat on the couch – I am mixing up the morning to see what comes of different postures. Provoking a new strand of this thread of Willing-by-Ink on dead trees. The surface texture broken on the plain expanse of cream-colored paper – a lined, effortful intent.

And there it is again, tension in the upper back and neck. Relief happens with a shoulder hunch and neck revolution, accompanied by a slight crinkling when tendons flex. The stretch is THERE… right in the middle of my upper back.

Realizing success in perseverance, in the effort of continuing the flow of inspiration, an overcoming of the inertia of decades. No regrets, but why did I not take up this from of art before? Was I betting on the lottery of slothful indulgence to pay off in the end?

The problem, the Buddha said, is that you think you have time.

Photo by Michele Montserrat

Extinction Rebellion

I may look more deeply at this organization…

Jessie Hennen

Last weekend, I attended my first meeting of the wholly wholesome protest sect Extinction Rebellion. If you’re a government agent reading this, I’d here like to state that they are not, in any way, a terrorist organization, despite the fearsome name. This is a post about what they are instead.

I think I suspected, while dressing (what to wear to a climate activist meeting, I fretted? Answer: literally anything) that it would be me and about six other people. Instead, they kept having to bring in more chairs.

I did not take photos, but if I had, a panorama of the room would have revealed:

  • Older women in vibrant attire.
  • Earnest couples in their early thirties, all definitely here for the first time, and probably, like me, wondering whether we can justify having kids.
  • Some timid young men, heads bent over phones.
  • Many people who used they/them pronouns. (“I respond…

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