Waiting to be Fed

It’s that magic half-hour
When color and distance deepen
And every photographer knows his
Pictures will look as good as a View Master slide.

My wife’s uncle pushes an old bike
Up against his tin shed of a house.
He’s 80 and too unsteady to ride far
So for the most part he just pushes the bike.

The dogs, too many to count, waiting to be fed,
Gather at his feet, milling about with tails wagging
As if they were on a dance floor keeping time
To Benny Goodman’s String of Pearls.

He produces a black plastic pail and sloshes
Boiled rice into three bowls apart: big, so so, and small.
Infirm and almost blind with no property or
Real family to call his own, this feeding remains
Of what he owes the world and all those living there.

My I Report (Who says journalism is dead?)

Beware Of Phony Solar Panels

Our investigation shows that at least one-of-five roof-top solar panels shipped, not only creates no electricity, but is actually made out of cardboard. If you can’t afford to hire a professional to verify that your roof-top array is for real, you can check for yourself by prying open a panel and looking at the backing. If you see an old movie poster for An Inconvenient Truth then your panel may or may not be in good working order. Who knows?

Nuts and Bolts of Bits

Some users trying to buy downloadable e-books have gotten a dialog box saying: Due to a world-wide shortage of bits, your order cannot be fulfilled at this moment. Rest assured that our supplier Alphabits (where do you think they come from?) is working overtime to provide our quota of bits which is now regulated by an A-B-C government agency.

The Future of Golf

When golf legend Arnold Palmer was in his heyday, his wife was interviewed on the Johnny Carson show. The show was broadcast live. Carson asked Mrs. Palmer if there was anything she did to bring her husband good luck before a tournament. At first she demurred, but then conceded that sometimes she kissed her husband’s balls. Carson then quipped, “I bet that makes his putter stand up.” Now many think that the Tiger Woods sex scandal may bring the golf world to its knees. Apparently, this has already been done.

Archimedes Was Right

Recent reports of an ice shelf the size of Rhode Island (or 4.789 million football fields containing enough water to fill 10,580,001 Olympic-size swimming pools) breaking off from Antarctica had people worrying about rising levels of the world’s oceans. Fact: ice in the sea displaces the same amount of water – the seas will NOT rise when the ice shelf melts. The weight of the ice sheet in Greenland has also been estimated to be 120,006.73 times the weight of the Great Wall of China. When that weight is removed, some scientist predict that the Greenland land mass will rise on average by 12.7 meters (or 4.2 Kobe Bryants standing on one anothers’ shoulders)! The simple, obviously too simple for our legislators, is to push all the glaciers into the sea, and open up the new land for oil prospecting and real estate development.

How Many BTUs Are In War and Peace?

It’s cold outside, people are freezing, the price of oil is high, and libraries have few books on their shelves. Are all these books checked out? Watch undercover footage of librarians trying to tell customers that the books are off being scanned as part of the Google Books Project. The truth couldn’t be further from the truth. These books being burned as bio-fuels to stay warm! Watch my I Report: the Scanning of America.

Introduction

For most poets there is no real market for poetry. Around the edges of where the market should be are how-to books, contests, critiquing services, and vanity presses. All of these seem to be a little more than hustles to separate the author from his money and not buy poetry - or even promote it. The foundations, organizations and colleges that do publish poetry all seem to be pretty much closed shops that evolved downstream of the "publish or perish" teaching requirement.

The digital revolution is also sucking the life out of traditional print media. Magazines and newspapers are migrating to the Internet where they are trying to reinvent themselves online. Needless to say publishing poetry is not high on their online agenda. The Internet, it also needs to be said, lends itself more to wide, superficial reading than the contemplative mindset most poetry needs.

On the other hand, the Internet does let me “publish” poems, stories, and essays myself. I may get fewer readers than Dickinson and while I may not end up as destitute as Poe who boiled wallpaper to make soup out of the glue, I’m surely not going to get rich. Publishing online, however, is reason enough to keep me writing, to keep trying to get to the center of things.Most of what you’ll see here has been written in and about rural Thailand. Thailand may not be “the damn good universe next door” that e e cummings wrote about, but it’s a lot closer to that universe than many of the places I’ve lived.

* * * * * *

I reserve the copyright to all works on this blog. You may download any poem for your personal use.

You can see pictures of Chonchai were I live at Chonchai.blogspot.com. My profile isn't showing up so you'll have to go to http://www.Peelok.blogspot.com to see the novel.

In the Mall of our Discontent

Are we just the sum of our
Likes and dislikes refined year on year
With the help of others?
And are likes and dislikes
The same as the phrase
All things seen and unseen
Which seems to slope up
In my mind like an
Escalator which we ride
Up and down without effort?

No, likes and dislikes
Is just another floor
Where shoppers carry
Away a raft of things
That aren’t quite true.

I stop in front of a bank of TVs
Where a glib man talks
About things too big to fail.

I sigh and think
We need a special sale
That discounts those other things
. . . That fill our need for more.

Poem: When our homes had value

The houses of my youth had musical names
Like bungalow and saltbox or
Garrison, cottage, and cape.
They weren’t mass-produced by
Crews of framers with pneumatic nailers,
But stick-built by men in bib overalls
Who smelled of sweat, smoked Lucky Strikes
And muttered cut once but measure twice
Whenever they knew I was around.
These houses were never flipped and
Only changed hands when the old man died.
When I hear now they’re losing value day-by-day,
I’m saddened but know there’s a point in my memory
Beyond which, and for my money, they cannot fall.

FG 2009





Notebook

Novels grow at the rate of house plants and equire attention every day.

3-23

Writing poetry:

Is deep diving. You don’t belong, but it’s magical

Writing fiction

Is like breaking the surface. You’re going to live; you still have a job.

3-18 Poetry is:

a stone wall that runs in a more or less true line through the heart of a NH forest


When I pick up a New Yorker, I always look at the cartoons first and then the poems. I think most people do the same thing. Poems should be short and self-contained the same way cartoons are.

A poem should be like Java, Sun Microsystems’ little software engine. It’s self-contained and toy-like.

Life is nothing but a mixed metaphor: We have a little black dog that has, what looks to me, to be a pair of donkey ears. Could this be the evolution between species those who believe in the Great Designer’s hands are looking for?

The iridescent green pound (₤) sign I see painted on the road turns out to be a foot long snake flattened by a car.

A young yellow cat comes around the corner of the house carrying in its mouth a chick he has just killed from next door. I only see him for a second, but the chick is almost as big as the cat so the cat has to hold its head back as if it were swimming. The dead bird’s body is black, but its head is white, all beak and eyes and I think it is a miniature ostrich with cartoon like eyelashes. The cat has the bird by a wing and as he runs and the bird’s feathers hang down like an inverted hand of cards.

I can’t imagine what America will be without newspapers. Even the NY Times is skirting receivership. We certainly will become a more polarized society because when you hold a newspaper your hands you have a small universe of opinions, interests and ads in your hands. When you go online, you are choosing your friends from the first click.

Poem: Two Graces

Make Me The Mystery

Drop me Lord
As I drop Thee,
And in the down of
Gentle swallow
Make me the mystery
Of your tomorrow.


May, Again

May
Witness like
April’s sun
Melt the silent snows
Of all our Thanksgivings
And lead lost children
To play in summery fields,
Again.

Forrest Greenwood

Poem: Apple trees

Apple Trees

In fall they leave our lives
Like aged parents given over the
Care of others.

In winter they stand back
Like dormant dreams and
Let us pass.

In spring they reach
Like giant nerves to touch
A rising sun.

In summer they flourish
Like families and yield
The most exquisite truth
Of hardwood and seed.