taking off, going places.

old meigs field, chicago.

saigon, rainy season.

organ grinder, prague.

wolf, woods.

bathouse

antarctica

blobfish, australia

bus, taipei

hao, nha trang

hac, hanoi

forest park, city of cemeteries, & the final resting place of 4 Haymarket rioters

remembering emma

Emma Bee Bernstein

May 16, 1985- December 20, 2008

snow & fog

For some, there will always be that one and only blizzard that defines the caliber of blizzards – even snowfalls – to follow. And no matter how brutal a blizzard is, no matter how gusty the wind and how slow the traffic, it will never compare to that memorable merciless blizzard.

sunny, spacious 2-bdr, heat included.

moving poems

Packing means finding something I haven’t seen in years, reminiscing for no more than 10 seconds, then either saving it or condemning it to death. Packing also means reading a segment or two from books.

I just finished reading a bit from Umberto Eco’s The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana that justifies why pages were ripped from my old notebooks – ripped to shreds – and are awaiting the fate of recycling, to be reincarnated into more paper for more eager juveniles to write bad verse: “They were poems. Poems so bad they could have been no one’s but mine. Teenage acne. I think everyone writes poems when they are sixteen; it is a phase in the passage from adolescence to adulthood.”  They weren’t kidding when they said you have to learn from your mistakes – and I know I have.  I’ll be damned if I ever pick up a pen to write a poem again.  I’d be wasting paper and time.  My wrists hurt from so much manual ripping of paper.

Good poems were found too. The other night, I found a stack of poems I’d printed out from somewhere, maybe eight years ago (this estimate is based on the typeface I used to re-format the poems) at least 50 poems by various poets. There was a fantastic one by John Berryman. Well, I read through every single one, and in the end, this one by Carl Sandburg made the most sense to me:

Sunset From Omaha Hotel Window

Into the blue river hills
The red sun runners go
And the long sand changes
And to-day is a goner
And to-day is not worth haggling over.

Here in Omaha
The gloaming is bitter
As in Chicago
Or Kenosha.

The long sand changes.
To-day is a goner.
Time knocks in another brass nail.
Another yellow plunger shoots the dark.

Constellations
Wheeling over Omaha
As in Chicago
Or Kenosha.

The long sand is gone
and all the talk is stars.
They circle in a dome over Nebraska.