at home in the library at the end of the Earth

children used to understand and visualize a bookend with metal, bronze, or some other sort of hard material- unlike the boring metal book ends of the 20th century…and it was within those bookends in a snug little room with the hard bound covers that one found solace, romance, or adventure of the cerebral kind.

but not today…not many today…

and so many minds reflect a shadow of the intelligence that graced this Earth when children read pages, not devices, in languages, not snatches of one-dimensional verbage.

in light of this, i have devoted some of our snow-filled nights to the reconstruction of an old style library…

sans devices

sans magazines

sans flexible metal hardware.

to snuggle up in a comfy chair as it snows the whole world over outside…with a cup of warm tea and a gripping story in your hands…is an underrated, and increasingly forgotten, winter pleasure.

To all you who will snuggle up by the fire with a good book…

May your journey find you warmth, peace, and a full imagination…

Smatterings of falling poetry

somewhere….out in the country, or even the city…it is raining poetry. Poetry from the sky, poetry on the slippery grass, poetry even when I slip…

…but mainly, there is poetry in my brain…the contents of which are cataloged in gray matter, or the “little grey cells,” as Master Poirot would say…

lodging somewhere in a more dusty area of that said library, under “i” for “interesting,” a rather banally ubiquitous category, one might find discarded portions of poetic raindrops that never fell to the earth. instead, the mind locked them within those long corridors, hiding them in the “fragment repository” rather than “special collections.”

some of these fragments have found daylight, scribbled on a note paper. it was my habit, in my middle youth, to keep paper and pencil beside my bedside every night…just in case, inspiration hit at 2 am. more often than not, the writing resembled a doctor’s orders, although scribbling snippets did manage to escape the trash bin for a proper college ruled page.

one of those treasures was a nonsense poem composed after a bizzare dream. it remains locked in my head because it was and is entirely too silly to publish…but now, i have no fear…

it began…

 

O, Buttercup Bill got quite a thrill

from chewing on vittles and sticks,

he made his meals with the flippers of seals

and flavored his salad with bricks.

 

it is, simply, the most ridiculous and bizzare thing I have ever written…and it came after a night of pizza and Double Cola.

for those of you who do not know what Double Cola is…

1. it looks like liquid battery acid, or maybe tastes a bit like it?

2. it contains more caffeine per ounce than any fizzy drink made before the advent of energy drinks. Double Cola’s only rival, from the same company is “Ski”, a drink where you can watch the caffeine-orange pieces float around inside the bottle.

3. drinking an eight pack of double cola (within a twelve hour period) will either (a) slur your speech (b) keep you up at least 72 hours (c) work like a coffee enema (d) induce projectile vomiting OR (e) bloat you up like a toad on steroids

But…in fairness, nightly semi-digested pizza has created many a crazy poem, television sitcom script, and presidential address over the past fifty or sixty years. in fact, every poem i have ever written following pizza-ingestion has turned out terrible, or at least a bit cheesy. that is why i gave up eating pizza for lent, post-lent, spring, summer, autumn, winter, and Groundhog Day.

So, since I no longer drink Double Cola, and I have abstained from pizza for about a year, the world is now safe from at least one more horrific poem.

 

 

 

 

In the blank space on the bookshelf

To everything…there is a season…Ecclesiastes claims, the Birds (not the angry ones) sang, and ’tis true. The trees, the leaves, the plants of the field, all change with time. And, so too, the ages of a man or a woman. And this we all know by a particular age- or will one day know. But life is so much more complicated than that, as Plan D changes into Plan E, so far removed from the Plan A we dreamed about when we were still wearing teenage haircuts and sporting waistlines that somehow elude the present evolving pull of gravity. Life is a complicated stretch of seasons, and often those seasons do not come into complete focus until they pass on…

So I sit by my computer contemplating how it has taken me three years to discover the principal spiritual purpose of this particular season, and why, after all this time, I failed to see the season for  what it was- only a season. In our great intelligence we believe that somehow this season will last so much longer than the previous one…but often that is not true.

Seasons, like an old bookshelf or bookcase, have bookends. Today, I rarely see the portable bookends, but the analogy should be recalled in order to understand how a life’s season is set. Chapters of each seasonal saga form books in our lives, and these are set off by the bookends- a beginning one and an ending one. Most of the time a dramatic event marks a solid bookend, and we know then that a transition stage- the blank space on the shelf between the sections of books- will take over until we are firmly established again in a pattern of books that make another season.

It is to this blank section on the shelf that I have jumped, not finding a bookend nearby yet, and hoping I do find that solid bronze or metal reminder, identifying the beginning of the next season. I do not fear this space, it is neither purgatory nor limbo, it is simply a space. I pray it remains blank until I can plainly see the other bookend. Meanwhile, I can watch the other leaves of books accumulate around me, as each person collects more seasons between shelves of this library. And soon it will be my turn to set the bookend against a new book, a new chapter, a new season in the continuing sage of life.