Overread at the Counter: Poem of the Day "Building Traditions"

we build traditions through seasonal repetition
of similarities that build upon the framework
of memories, usually from childhood (for childhood
is the fount of all memories, even the unremembered
memories), and this framework is

like the circle of a dreamcatcher, and the traditions
are the webbing between the circle, and the tiny
charms, dangling from the conflux, through which
the morning light shines, and

we awake in some new season to add another dream.




MR
2015-0110

Overheard at Table 3: "Pride"

The 18 year old girl asks her parents for money for her school books,
the day she spends $438 for contact lenses,

Her mom asks, "Did you need contacts?"

"Yes."

"Do you need contact lenses?"

"Yes."

"Why?"

The 18 year old girl does not respond.  Then, she offers only,

"Because."

"Because why?"

"Because I asked dad for the money for them on Christmas and he didn't get me anything for Christmas."

"He paid $500 to fix your car!  That was your Christmas money!"

The 18 year old girl says, "He would have had to do that anyway."

Overread at Table 3: Poem of the Day "Bonding"

The brother sits holding game console, shooting
shooting
shooting
God knows what human/animal/alien/zombie.  Headset microphone,
he speaks to other teenage boys (or men still acting
like teenage boys), while his sister

sits on the bed, laptop open,
watching season 1 of the Flash,

the new kitten, two days after a neutering,
lies stretched out against the pillow, lulled into half-sleep
by the painkillers.

Mom pops her read into the room, asks what they
are doing.

"Bonding," they tell her,
"We're bonding."






MR
2016-0109

Overread at Table 3: Poem of the Day (Morning Walk)

Morning walk, a blanket of fog settled on this
suburban street, punctuated by the occasional streetlamp.

Clumps of leaves, wet and black,
carpet the sidewalk in patchwork paint.

The droplets of the midnight's rain that wriggle through tree branches
Sound like the crackling embers of a dying campfire.




MR
2016-0108

Overread at Table 5: Poem of the Day (another couplet)

This is another couplet, just like yesterday.  Don't really want to seem as though I am "cheating the system" as it were, but writing couplets and calling them "poems"  - this one actually has the image of a running river, through tall jagged mountains, a pale grey sky, 50 foot tall pines trees as the only witnesses to the action in the poem.  The picture of the river in my head is from a river that I saw while driving down from Whistler toward Vancouver in British Columbia.  I think it's called the Squamish River, but I might be wrong.  Still, that titled the poem.



Squamish River Walk

Old man walks into the freezing river.
The quiet death of a faithful son.



Originally I had "frozen" because that indicates the stopping of time.  "Freezing" suggests motion, which I suppose is what I really mean, although I do prefer the sound of "frozen" over "freezing" because "freezing" is also subjective, whereas "frozen" is not.

Lastly, after I wrote it I also realized this was a dig at my writing teachers who always called me "too adjectival."  There's FOUR adjectives in this puppy - almost half the words!  Ha!   And run them through your head in order:  Old, Freezing, Quiet, Faithful.    Taken in sequence, they all describe the man.  

The old man is also a faithful son.  What happens in between is supposed to prove that, but how?  How does killing yourself by walking into a freezing cold river make you faithful?

I suppose we should ask the old man, but he's not talking.  At least not any more.



MR
2016-0107

Overread at the Counter: Poem of the Day (yesterday, again!) (2 lines)

To be honest, these lines were written in a different form by a Tweep of mine, who I mistook for stating something about the current suffering in Sudan.   However, she corrected me to let me know that it actually is a some sort of play on words from a dirty limerick that starts "There once was a man from Khartoum."  I don't know that limerick, but the lines stayed with me and I put them into this form, hoping that everyone will read them and think of me as a genius on the same level as Ezra Pound.

Lines:

Who knows who is doing what and to whom,

Behind the scenes these days in Khartoum.

MR

2016-0107

Overheard at Booth 4: Cubicle Coughing

"... the guy in the cubicle next to me, he's so stupid, because he's sitting there, coughing and hacking and sneezing all day long, and I'm like, 'well duh! you brought all those boxes from storage, don't you know what kind of dust is in all that paper?' Now I've got to deal with him hacking up a lung all day long!"