Night on the Town

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Tearful Proposes To The Lady on the Verge

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The only reason any of you are alive right now is because she said yes.

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Namaste, you lucky sons a bitches!

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reblogged from this isn’t happiness.

Happy Thanksgiving, Bedford Falls!

“Spot Weld Your Turkey For Moist And Tender Breasts!”

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A day to give thanks seems a good thing. Is a good thing. Not seems.

For the wife and I, it is the one time a year we open our home to any and all. We put a good feed on and have a damn good time and then we go back to our hemit-like existence, which we are also thankful for.

I wish you all could be here, it’s going to get disgusting!

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Namaste, and have seconds with that.

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We Sing You, Jimmy Sky

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“We Sing You, Jimmy Sky” by Deirdre Dore.

Okay, I got Deirdre’s book only a couple of days ago, but what I’m about to say should not be considered provisional.

Buy this book.

Read it.

Read it again.

Read it yet again.

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Then give me a call so we can talk about it.

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First of all, the voice is plain spoken and the world is this world. Maybe not your world or my world, but her world: now it belongs to all of us. I initially thought of a shaker chair against a white-washed wall in a slant of light on a clean wood floor to describe her writing and her mastery of it, but it is less fussy and scolding.

You have to go back in time farther and go east.

Think of a simple Japanese home with handhewn beams and finely jointed construction throughout, never a nail. Stripped of frills. Full of wabi-sabi.

What Dore does here in this book of poems is to state her case plainly, but with great care and something more stern than honesty. Structurally, she is borrowing from James Schuyler’s Hymn to Life, and by extention, Eliot’s Wasteland. And there is plenty of both of them visible in the bones and in one or two images, which astound and ring like bells.

But fundamentally Dore works with her own two hands in the hard marrow of her own life. I’m reminded of Dugan and Gilbert and of Hemingway and of Pollock of all people and of all of them she stands her ground more simply and with a sterner presence. Like Hemingway, she knows her stuff and we as readers are the beneficiaries of the depth of her knowledge of the world she inhabits. The details of a thing can’t be faked, and we are in good hands with her.

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But I can’t do service to this work. It is grander and more fine than I can tell.

What matters perhaps is that this work rewards you for the reading of it. Her images rise and rise again in my consciousness, like fish hooks in the skin tugging at me, dragging me gasping to the too-bright surface of the river.

I am a poet and a reader of all great things and I don’t know that I have encountered her equal.

She has got me undone, utterly.

Read her if you want to know how to make great art from the world at hand.

Read her if you mistrust religion and politics and the heart of man.

Read her if you are nursing a great wound.

Read her if you are going to have a baby.

Read her if you must bury one you love.

Read her if you still have hope or if you have forsworn it.

Read her if you seek a way to be in this world.

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It is but a small book.

Go see what it has to say.

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Girl No. 32

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So, this grief.

It is nothing special. Grief is all over the place, you don’t have to go looking for it. It’s right there, out in the open. Easy to see.

Or the causes of it, at least.

Maybe grief itself is less visible.

The cause of my sadness is not anything earth-shattering. But it has taken hold of me. I thought for a long time that I was dealing with it. I thought it wasn’t bothering me, that I had found a way to get along and not feel it. Like a dull ache, a sore tooth, but not the keep you awake in the night agony.

But then a few days ago something came unmoored inside me and the grief rose up, like a leviathan from the depths of a dark sea, and I was undone. It felt as fresh and astounding as falling in love at sixteen.

I was that unhinged.

Luckily, I am old enough to have weathered a few storms, so I waited, and it passed. Or subsided, for that’s all it did. It yet endures. It won’t return to the depths, but stirs near the surface, agitated, moony, inconsolable.

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I am tended to in my grief by my long-suffering partner, who holds me like a baby and soothes me with her touch. What a great gift I have in her. Next to that my grief is but small, truly.

I go on and on in these pages about suffering and beauty, longing, despair, as if I had an understanding of them. I do not. I do not.

I am constantly undone by them in their each particular way.

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It is something to stand before a problem you can’t solve, nor lessen, nor end, ignore, or endure. It is akin to that feeling of standing before the sea in its endless thrashing of the shore, or that feeling of lying under a wild star-strewn sky high in the mountains, far from the stain of city lights.

When you know in your bones you are less than small.

In a universe that is implacable and horrifying for its scope and scale.

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Ah, we yet endure. For our small span of time. We seek our comforts, and often find them.

I claim this grief as my own. I have earned it. I will not be a bad host to it. I will not refuse it.

You can’t say no to none of it.

That’s the whole point, isn’t it?

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So, thank you, my good friends, for the kind thoughts you are sending my way. I am glad for them, and glad in my heart for each of you.

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The world is not kind, but there is kindness in it.

Namaste.

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I couldn’t be

more sad if I tried.

Leading The Blind To Water And Making Them Drink

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I got a love for this world.

I know it aims to kill me.

It’s just so damn good looking.

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One of my big faults is buying into this idea that to be a man you have to be a fist-fighting, bridge-building, bear-killing, art committing, novel-writing, good-woman-loving, stout-hearted, fearless, warm-hearted, sink-fixing, celestial-navigating, straight-razor-shaving, bronc-busting, homestead-making, fish-catching, bomb-defusing son-of-a-bitch.

And I am short a few of the above.

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It galls me.

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But I have put a few sons of bitches away.

I have put down almost every murder that came my way, and then some that never really did. I had to go stick my nose into them and get what I was after.

Nor have I forgotton those I have failed.

Your faces yet live with me.

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I am a dyed in the wool so and so.

You can ask anybody.

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Namaste, y’all.

Sinking Dirigible

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I’ve got nothing to regret.

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Well, that’s a lie.

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The list is longer than my arm.

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I am at the business of writing a little something.

I have a small fire burning for it.

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I am thinking today about Sgt. Kimberly Munley.

Her actions make me so proud.

She ran to the sound of gunfire and put her man down. She took bullets in both legs and her right wrist and yet closed on him, firing all the way. She put four bullets in him. She stopped that son of a bitch right there.

I’d like to buy her a beer, I’ll tell you what.

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I’d like to paint her goddamn house.

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I got a call on Friday from this woman, she’s crazy as a shit house rat. She’s got aphasia and the IQ of a ten year old girl and she’s pretty good looking. You can see the problem there.

The local cops are sick of her shit.

But she’s going to get killed by this guy who’s stalking her.

It isn’t anyone who’ll listen to her.

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I’m fooling myself thinking I can make a difference. In ways that matter or don’t.

This shitstorm has been rolling on unimpeded long before I showed up.

I ought to be more cautious than I am.

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But it can’t be helped.

It’s some things you do despite you know better.

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Namaste, y’all.

Don’t give up.

You’ll yet persevere.

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