Why most Dogs are my Friends

my thoughts are bubble gum long
a bubble is blown and then it's gone
before I remember any total song
so I do a lot of jogging & walking
with half my time smiling & talking
trying to listen and not miss a thing
wishing I were a bird on the wing
but knowing only bits of the song
until I hear the voices of dogs barking
they've known the melody all along

Memories that could be poems:

I spent many of my immediate post-high-school years with a thumb in the air looking for travel opportunity back and forth between Odessa, TX and Orange County, CA. It was sometimes slow going, it was mostly stopwatch quick. But don't think I traveled I-10. Those cars & trucks mostly couldn't and so mostly didn't ever stop for thumbs in the air. From Odessa, I went to Andrews and then to Carlsbad and then, often along Hwy 66, the best way I could to CA. And mostly retraced steps back.

July, Nikos, crows, and Theodore

July is not as hot in Eugene as in Houston
but the rains of winter and spring are long gone.
Our primary chorus continues to be the geese
but the crows are abundant, cheerful, and loud.
I seem to enjoy the geese arguing overhead
and the crows arguing in our yard. They are our bards.
I have not thought of Nikos Kazantzakis in some hours.
We like our red geraniums and miss Theodore Roethke.

I recognize sometimes that I am a lost ant on a large leaf
drifting through turmoils of crappy conditions
and that I float north on the Willamette
going in the opposite direction of much of the world.
I am okay with alternate directions and can smile
without quoting lines of poems from Theodore Roethke
as we do our daily walk through the Delta Ponds.
I cannot help but repeat bits of Nikos Kazantzakis on the trail.

My Poem July 2020

My poem, like some others,
is mostly a gentle searching of words
to give my morning coffee taste
and pull taint of my supper from the blues.
I know to always dance without haste
and mostly sing at the top of my scale.
I don't yet scribe in other's tongues

nor sing my words with thought.
I am but the crow you caught.

My songs are mostly your smiles
searching out some rounder, prouder world.
We may wear mostly scarfed bandanas
against the whirls of terrible yesterdays
but sometimes we see our tomorrow
without proper masks meant to hide
but merely to guard our love and abide.

We do not need to borrow from hope;
a step at a time is all it takes to cope.

From an Old Conversation with an Older Friend

A: Life is holding your guts in your hands. Dripping a little . . .

B: . . . what?

A: Life is an undoing of yourself, a letting go with both hands. Otherwise, you exist. Nothing else. Like a rock exists. Perhaps someone will come along and go chip chip. Maybe you'll sparkle and become a ring setting, but beauty is not what life is about. Beauty is incidental; Living creates beauty - not the reverse.

B: You make it sound weird. Absurd. Maybe even almost life perverted, madness.

A. Yes! Yes! Madness is part of life. And absurdity is part of the madness. Perversion? It's an artificial word. A moral word. But within its made-up context, okay, maybe. You decide.

B: and . . .

A: Breathe in the air you find . . . you are not a rock.

Rejoicing Well When Lost

Euterpe dances in transparent dress
against the sea. She is the ocean stone
toiling toward the shore - her tears caressing
her riven cheeks. She clicks, bone against bone,
a fictive note, her long toes zither fast
among the breakers as she sways the wind
against the sea. Her singing cannot last
a printed page, recognition is the end.
She leaves no face reflected in the long
morning's moon, just a clack of spent coin
in an empty glass; a formal song
that stirs no wind - each song sung but once.
We float to shore singing from her sea
searching inland, repeating this from memory.