My shortest poem

Why I fail

Because I try to succeed.

63/100

Failure, horticultural-style. Every spray of green you see is a crape myrtle. The tallest one which grazes the top of the photo, is over five feet tall. Other than the columbine you see in the extreme lower right, and the yellow tassels of goldenrod peeking through the crape myrtle, everything you see in the foreground is a crape myrtle. We paid last October to have the one crape myrtle which grew here removed. August 2026.

In some ways that’s a pretty cheap get I’ve put up there, but here’s what’s been playing on my mind:

Recently I’ve been attempting to not over-plan my days and then just hope I make good in-roads on completing some of them, nibbling at some others, and just feeling crummy about all the important ones that didn’t see a bit of my attention. “Wow,” I’ll say to my wife, “I really need to get to [insert important item].” I’ve found I use it as subterfuge. I’ll plan 6-10 tasks, a good handful of them all-day-and-more projects, then I’ll cherry pick the ones I want to work on. That one I’ve “really got to get to” becomes the sacrifice day after day. Plus, if you condition yourself to not getting things done, you begin to feel only superficially guilty about not doing them. Instead, the past two weeks I’ve estimated the amount of time certain tasks will take, generally held to that regardless of them getting completed, and planned no more of them than there is time in my day. I try to learn where I need to get more accurate on projecting how long a task will take. And just to keep it real, I plan 90 minutes called “personal time/time sucks” to acknowledge there are just unavoidable interruptions in everyone’s day. Thus, I’ve been failing because I’ve attempted to over-succeed.
In a larger sense, it’s difficult these days to go more than a month or two without encountering “you’ve got to fail to succeed,” spouted by some motivational type of person. (Gah! I thought I would get away from cheerleaders when I got out of school!) While I can quibble a bit with the mentality—I can point to many people, many situations where they will continue to fail, never experiencing success—it’s true right down in the gut that quitting because you’ve failed once isn’t a very good strategy. Date someone and they break up with you? I guess you’re not cut out for love! Put all your money on red and it comes up black? “I guess I’ll never win at roulette.” Or how about, “I could never make myself write. I guess I’m just not a writer.” Now look at the boy. Shooting for success almost always guarantees encountering some failure.
And last week I read “These 20 Words Are Worth a Thousand Pictures” an article about a very short poem by Ezra Pound. (I hope that link gets you behind the paywall. I’ve never tried to share an article to the entire world before.) Let’s dispense with the fact Pound collaborated with the fascist regime in Italy in WWII. Ernest Hemingway seems to have been a pretty good male chauvinist, and Michael Jackson, well, where do I start? All have undeniable artistic talent. Coming back to the poem and the article, I realized poetry takes a multiplicity of forms. As a writing friend told me a month ago, “It’s a poem if you say it’s a poem.” I hope the person saying it’s a poem (me) has enough artistic integrity to adhere to his idea of poetry. I think 25-40% of my poems have not been very good in this 100-poems-in-100-days thing. Poems condense meaning. They are to literature what a fine spirit is to alcoholic beverages. They seek not the pretty good word, but the right word, the best word. One doesn’t find the jigsaw piece which closely fits and just hammer it into the puzzle. One seeks for that piece which perfectly fits the hole. I’m going to continue to attempt to write successful poems. I will fail…but maybe not all of the time.

Say goodnight, Gracie.

Keep trying

Eastern Tiger Swallowtail butterfly, likely female, on Anise Hyssop. September 2026.

One of my new favorite plants is the anise hyssop. Anise hyssop grows to about four feet with long flower clusters at the end of each upward branch. These clusters each have what looks like about 100 flowers. The large one in the photo above has approximately 50 clusters. (I had to count them for a pollinator study I participated in.) The weight and height of the branches causes them to bend a bit, making them look like a flower arrangement to me. The flowers don’t bloom all at the same time, but over the past two seasons ours has peaked in late June through mid-July, after which some of the flowers begin to do whatever propagation chores the plant must do.

Same bee, different photo from July’s. Note more flower clusters in the background. July 2026.

The hyssop attracts many pollinators. I participated in the Great Southeastern Pollinator Count two weeks ago, choosing this plant because it had so many flowers. I counted mostly Eastern bumblebees and a little wasp about a half inch in length. Others included a very small bee, ants, another kind of insect I’ll just call a beetle, and the biggest dang wasp I’ve ever seen! I looked it up, and I’m sure I saw a Great Black Wasp. I’ve seen three different maximum lengths ranging from 1.4-2.0 inches. I swear it was about 2.0 inches in length. Absolutely huge.

Yesterday I saw our lone species of hummingbird here in the SE United States, a ruby-throated one, also checking out the hyssop. It seemed to prefer the similar-looking flowers of the obedient plant quite near me. And both yesterday and today the several hyssop plants in our yard have been caught the attention of Eastern Tiger Swallowtail butterflies.

When I began the census count, I lamented to my wife that most of flowers have long past their peak. I expected to find few pollinators compared to June-July. The purple coneflowers have lost all their petals; the spiky centers remains, attracting goldfinches to the seeds, not pollinators to the pollen. Similarly, the black-eyed Susans and Indian blanket flowers have mostly disappeared.

But strangely (to me), the hyssop seems to have popped out more flowers! Over the past three days bees, most of the Eastern carpenter variety, have been madly jumping on the hyssop flower clusters. From a distance they’re visible by watching the ends of the stalks bouncing up and down in a non-existent breeze. And then there’s the apparent delight some butterflies have taken in finding yet more flowers on the hyssops.

We need to keep trying, keep putting out those flowers of attraction. It makes a difference. Perhaps “carpenter bees” aren’t your thing. Perhaps you dislike benign-but-huge “wasps”. No matter. Our purpose is to flower. Let the rest take care of itself.

Belated 62

Unbelievably, I simply forgot to post yesterday’s poem. I broke the chain. (Hangs head in shame.)

Loss of control

narrow your focus for
life comes easier with
fewer rules: single 
minds, simple minds,
bringing finally non-
thinking minds. thus
we lose control.

62/100

Equanimity

Life hits lulls where everything seems
"Okay"—
Not "Good" not "Bad" just
beautiful balance, something which
seems more normal. Those highs
match lows for extreme stress on
emotions, on health, on mental
well-being. "Give me equanimity 
or give me breath!" Thank you,
Patrick. Always thought you were
too wound up, but now I see you're
just like all of us: wanting to keep
our heads down for fear of getting
whacked in some cosmic Whack-a-Mole
game without rhyme, reason.

61/100

4×4

a haiku for modern drivers. I wish I had a photo

Tough white four-by-four
jacked up, one ton, approaches
speed bump: slow to ten!

60/100

Waiting

Old folks get “procedures”…lots and lots of ’em. Is it worse to prepare for where cameras should never go, or wait for someone else’s? (Said “someone” adding two hours to the wait because the fine print for drinking liquids addressed certain drugs which said “someone” might have been taking.)

Was this grass gone to seed when I entered the building? August 2026.

Waiting
[.....]
Never my strong suit, worse
when it's unanticipated. 
Need to blame someone. Hope 
we're at fault; hope we're not. 
Then again...what did you
plan to do today? Nothing
Much. What ARE you doing? 
See? If two roads lead 
to the same place, how can
one be better? (However: 
could that dude perhaps
lower that video's volume?)

59/100

man with cat

A haiku today, the second of slight illness (on top of all the parts of me which don’t seem to want to work right). It’s OK. I think it just started raining, and I know I’ll mostly be just chillin’ tomorrow when my wife has one of those procedures all of us old people get….


man with cat on lap
pet each other—happiness.
nubbins on his pants

58/100

fly in the explosion

Almost every day, he said, my
glass seemed more than half full,
but a fly would dance on top. When
we came into home, winging away
from sunset, I saw one cloud-like
nuclear explosion. My trip's 
symbolic, beautiful resolution.

57/100

Found poem 25August

Different voices have defined “found” poems differently. Here, I started with the opening line of a poem I drafted over a dozen years ago, then used random web pages to suggest a few words from which would spring the next line. I let whatever revealed itself in my creative half exist without immediately squashing it, merely shaping it, translating it from my interior language-without-words to a poor imitation in English. My Editor insisted on punching meaning into it, which I allowed. At the end I decided it needed to come full circle, thus lending meaning (I hope) to the final lines. In a way, this process worked similarly to something I’m getting ready to post (non-poem) when time allows.

We wear patchwork clothes, stitched by sadness
not to have seen snow leopards through our
blizzarding genesis. Inspired by writings we
don't understand, we personalize them 
to make everything obtain meaning 
where none existed. Welcome to your mission:
to drive home meaning to others while 
pathetically struggling to find your own,
exhibiting your confidence which betrays
your lack of understanding. "the mic is yours,
Ken," as if he thinks I'm important. Games,
games fill cracks left when motive, meaning
dried up. More valuable than playing? Being.
Staying within where we find nothingness
imbuing everything-ness. Boldly facing it
without doing, comfortable in this. Yet,
in here we wear patchwork clothes,
satisfied they're stitched by sadness.

56/100