Eye of the coffee

I’m having a little difficulty with the rhythm of the final lines, but it’s worth sharing at this point.

The eye of my coffee cup stares at me.
Columbian farmers peer out of inky liquid.
Buyers bought these beans to profit from
our concentrated wealth, our insatiable desire.
How many hands dried it, bagged it, moved it
to warehouses? To docks? To ships through ports?
Even here, where processes reverse, where bags
leave pallets like children from orphanages:
once again care and love infuse the beans.
Pallets become small roasted batches. Batches
become a collection of one-pound bags, sold
to households...To me, where the eye of my coffee
asks, "Is this the best way to show love? Is this
the best way to transfer wealth? To care for
our planet? Where will your ephemeral concern
land next? What will I need to do next week 
to satisfy you? How may I please you, 
master?

Stray thoughts

A crazy jumble of [stuff] going through my head…

I sure love homemade granola! So easy, too. Can’t figure out why I took nearly a half year to replenish our inventory of the stuff. October 2026.

Here are some quotes I’ve been saving up. Inspiring, frivolous, hopefully entertaining:

I am never more generous than when I split open an avocado, see that it’s perfect, and agree to share half with my husband.

Mia Leimkuhler in The New York Times

There’s a book called 222 Cemeteries to See Before You Die by Loren Rhoads. Makes me wonder if there isn’t a cemetery tour or something after you die. If there isn’t such a thing, there should be…

Me

Music is the reward for being alive.

Jorma Kaukonen (guitarist/singer, founding member of Jefferson Airplane and Hot Tuna)

I can’t possibly be this ancient. I haven’t had enough time to prepare myself to be this old.

The father of Martin Hesp on or near his 67th birthday. M. Hesp is a British journalist and blogger

When you come to Philly [to play baseball], you forget about nutrition. You eat the cheesesteaks in the visiting clubhouse.

Freddie Freeman (Atlanta Brave and LA Dodger)

I literally don’t have even 25% of the time I need every day to do what I want and what must be done to function in society. (If at 72 I don’t function in society, they will take me away and put me in a home.) I am not one of those persons spoken of in the semi-famous quote, “Millions long for immortality who don’t know what to do on a Sunday afternoon.” In any one moment I can plan four days’ worth of things to do in the next four hours. This means I’m always under a bit of tension because everywhere I look I see things I “want” to do but haven’t touched (or even begun) in the four years since the idea first occurred…or six…or twelve…or longer. Life’s mundane ways are interfering with my life.

There’s supposedly a Turkish saying, “No matter how far down the path you’ve traveled, if you discover it’s the wrong one, turn back.” I read it one day in my Franklin Planner, sometime between 1997-2001. It’s resonated for the decades since, but it’s losing its impact now that I’m over 70. There are a few paths that cannot be retraced at this age. I would still be recovering that lost distance when I moved to ‘the home’ preparatory to dying. Example: I’ve purchased houses poorly throughout my life, fixating on what would make it closer to perfect but not realizing I was not capable of doing those things. The house we live in now is almost certainly the last one. We set out to get a house with the master bedroom on the main floor along with laundry facilities. The overarching premise was to avoid stairs. We achieved the stated goal: bedroom and laundry are on the main floor. But the house has a basement which now holds our freezer, the beer fridge, my office, the library/study, and a rec room. In short, I spend large chunks of every day downstairs, and I need to go up and down those stairs every time I want a beer, need to get something out of the freezer, need to do anything on my computer, or heck, empty a cat box.

Yet since I was a teenager I’ve dreamed of a one-story Spanish-style house which from above would look like a capital U. The base of the U would house the common rooms, one wing would hold the master bedroom suite and personal office/hobby space (plus laundry services), and the third wing would house spare bedrooms. I have never come close to purchasing such a home in the fifty years since I thought of it.

And that’s just one! I guess I have regrets or at least questions, all of them related to what were you thinking?

In a book I read about being a Philadelphia sports fan, there’s a quote which explains them quite well. I’ve lost the book and can’t quite remember the title, but the quote goes something like this:

In Philadelphia the glass is not only half empty, it’s got a cigarette butt in it and a lipstick stain on the rim.

Cheers, everyone!

Falling southward

Looking southeast from our deck. October 2026.

I always believe my house faces west and backs onto east, but it isn’t so. Therefore we arrive at this point where nearly a month after the equinox the sun shines directly into the house through the door to the deck—Thursday the 15th—and I realize we’re looking southeast, not east. It’s momentarily saddening, but how can one be sad when the day opens like this and fulfills its promise to deliver near-90° temperatures?

Yes, that’s a lot of dirt down there. Not very green is it? That’s actually what a natural forest looks like around here, more or less. This fall and next spring we’ll be filling it in with some more plants, but mostly this is it. Soon the yellowing leaves on the tulip poplars (one at the right in the photo) will carpet the ground. The Carolina cherry Laurel keep its leaves—it’s an evergreen.

Another superfluous cat photo

…or, sometimes my cats like each other…

Charlie (left) likes to sleep with his brother Benny. Sometimes Benny lets him. October 2026.

It’s been an unpleasant shock to realize our cats are well into their 15th year, with a birthday occurring sometime around March 2027. Unpleasant because they’re older already than all but one of the other ten cats who have lived with me since I was but 24 years old. (I wonder what it’s like when your littermate never leaves you?)

So you wrote a lot of poems…

Maybe it was crazy to attempt 100 daily poems.

I had thought to wait another day or two for the Poem Post-Mortem (which sounds pretty cool if you say it aloud). I had a lot of reactions in the final ten days or so, and I see no reason to wait. In no particular sequence, here are some reactions of this author…

It actually got easier in a way when I got into it. In reviewing at random over the course of the writing (July 7 to October 8), I noticed that somewhere around one-third of the way in, between poem 31 and 35, the subjects seemed to suggest themselves more easily. They acted like shy faerie folk who don’t know what to make of the giant human at first. Were there any ‘good’ poems in the first 33? I guess. I’m much more pleased with the ones over the final third.
I became more surprised at what words showed up. In particular, Daymare (Oct 1) popped in from who-knows-where. All I did was think, “I’d like to write something more ‘image-ry’ like the ones Bridgette does.” Fine, mission accomplished, but from where did the image come?
I surprised myself also by sticking with it. My general attitude toward life has been, “when the going gets tough, get going,” in the sense of go work somewhere else, go do something else. “Life’s too short to keep [insert what I don’t want to do].” Yet I cracked the ends of both radii in my arms only two weeks in and kept right on writing. I traveled for two weeks yet wrote poems #35 through #49. I contracted the flu Type A on September 24 and kept right on writing. I must credit Bridgette with that, mostly, because she kept writing through her time sucks and bodily aches.
More people are interested in reading my poems than my prose. My blog readership increased about 100%, and my followers rose about 10%-20%.
In the beginning I mined poems written long ago when I railed inside at the perceived shortcomings of the people running my places of employment. (I still think I was partially right, but over the two to three decades I accumulated those poems, I learned two things: there are more paths to the goal than you think; and oftentimes the goal you think you’re working toward is not the goal your management is working toward.) Those poems in my opinion remained stilted, as if I tried to breathe life into a corpse but only succeeded in creating a zombie.
I have a peculiar knack to take a popular tune from my younger days and spontaneously craft new words for it on the fly. I sing these to my wife who rarely is amused by it. I’m rather proud of the fact I can create rhymes and mimic the meter of the original tune, but then I’m a borderline narcissist. This talent(?) helped in writing poems, particularly when I decided to rhyme them.
When I lowered my expectations my poems rose in quality.
I have a strong urge to publish a poem today! Resisting.

I thought as I got into this a little bit that it might be fun to rework the better poems and churn out a chapbook. I still might, but I’m thinking more that I will be working some poems on the side for submission to poetry websites. There are plenty. A new blog I follow, zumpoems, has this list of more than 4000 places which will accept submissions.

About the photo: I’ve carried that book around for about 30 years (published 1996), even though by then I had given up on my dream of actually earning a living from my creative writing. I never liked it that much. Pulling it from the to-be-donated pile, I thumbed through it today and I’m much more inspired by its suggestions and insights. Like so many things in my life, poetry came to me when I quit trying to be a poet.

And the poets down here don’t write nothing at all,
they just stand back and let it all be…

—from “Jungleland” by Bruce Springsteen

Found poetry

[apologies for any typos or grammatical errors. I just didn’t take the time to proofread this.]

A reader responded to my recent post Found Poem #2 requesting a bit more knowledge about my input to the poem and the process used to create it. From Wikipedia:

Found poetry is a type of poetry created by taking words, phrases, and sometimes whole passages from other sources and reframing them (a literary equivalent of a collage[1]) by making changes in spacing and lines, or by adding or deleting text, thus imparting new meaning. The resulting poem can be defined as treated: changed in a profound and systematic manner; or untreated: virtually unchanged from the order, syntax and meaning of the poem.

The concept of found poetry is closely connected to the revision of the concept of authorship, in the 20th century, (as John Hollander put it, “anyone may ‘find’ a text; the poet is he who names it, ‘Text'”).

I’m rejecting these commonly accepted definitions, or rather, I’m expanding the boundaries of the definition. In my most recent example, I used the paradigm of my trip from Raleigh, NC, to Seattle, WA, as an organizing theme. I let my mind wander with minimal focus from the beginning of the flight out of Raleigh through to the family celebration of life held the next day for my cousin. The day started with my morning dose of blood pressure and anti-inflammatory meds plus the recently-added Vitamin D to heal my broken arms. The first take starts the launch into what I’m calling a ‘found poem’.

pills once taken for entertainment
now do anything but, maintaining 
dubious adherence to general 
opinion.

Through the comma, I’m just starting yet another poetic rant about being old. But, because I’m keeping my mind open to whatever pops into it, my added clause appends an opinion which floats in my head all the time: we take pills based on faith in a medical opinion not a medical reality. [Quick take: high cholesterol doesn’t guarantee a heart attack or stroke. It’s simply been observed that people with higher cholesterol also have a higher correlation to suffering a heart event. It’s therefore quite plausible if you have higher cholesterol you’re more likely to have such an event. Ah, but wait. In order to be measured, these terms need to be defined. What is “high” cholesterol? For that matter, what is “cholesterol” mean when uttered in the context I just put it in? What’s high for me is different than what’s high for you, because as every doctor I’ve consulted will say, “we-e-e-ellllll everybody’s different.” Therefore we issue recommendations for use of drugs which get codified by medical protocols and insurance providers into hard-and-fast rules use terms which have a little bit of arbitrariness to them and which we know don’t apply equally to anybody. And don’t get me started on the more-common-than-you-might-think possibility of lab error.]

Back to poetry: now that a theme has suggested itself—remember, based off of using my consciousness only to observe what popped into my mind. I “see” a reaction in my head. Explaining this would take many posts, but the gist is that almost everything I write is an attempt to describe something I see in my head. It’s not an idea I’m trying to convey, although I’ve attempted this a few times during this #100poems thing. It’s an actual picture of something in the way only a mind kind see. In my fledgling poem I now suddenly see a swirling vapor of accepted opinion that circulates around Profound Truth somewhat in the way Plato said that thing about shadow’s in the cave and the reality that cast them there. I look then to the next thing on my journey that occurred within the context of the now-established theme except I’m still not forcing conscious manipulation on it.

Next, in the sequence of the journey is the schedule I’m trying to meet to get to my airport at just the right time, defined by me as getting through TSA with enough time to assemble my Stashed Stuff (that which one removes to not set off alarms), pee, and start the boarding process. It’s never perfect, but I’m searching for that sweet spot where I walk up to the podium at TSA, traverse the security gamut, put my belt on and re-populate my pockets, pee, and walk up just as my boarding group is requested to line up. Here my subconscious serves up another gem:

schedules provide 
meaningless information to
entice us with false surety.

It occurs to me I’ve rarely started boarding exactly when the airline says it will start (to the minute), nor has the flight started at the time advertised more than 10% of the time. Hey, look, it’s another swirling piece of truth-vapor around Real Truth. Now the poem becomes easier. The next observation gets its frame of reference from how the experienced traveler becomes adept at moving through airport crowds, lines, and the overlapping PA announcements, all based on trying to move through St. Louis’s Lambert Airport. Moving through the automatic exit doors at Sea-Tac Airport prompted the next one, and the reflection on security in that one prompted me to jump backwards to an occurrence when I went through TSA back in Raleigh when I passed a tissue packet through the body scanner because he said something about metal and I thought, “hey it’s silver. Is it metallic?” (No, it wasn’t.)

I won’t belabor the rest of it. I let my mind wander to the next salient event, hitting the bar up at my hotel, then to the Uber driver I had. His silence I imputed to be from a lack of English and suddenly Fear Of ICE jumped into my brain. The memorial was held at a golf course, and I’ll admit, I molded this line consciously based on my love of the beauty of golf and the wastefulness of maintaining the courses in these days of dwindling water.

And suddenly I realized my mental walk through the trip had brought me to where I sat physically in my hotel room. For some reason, the necktie I’d used just minutes before to clean my glasses—OMG, silk ties clean glasses better than anything!—put the image of Sylvester Stallone tying that rag around his head and the moment he says in, what, #2, “I’m coming to get you, Murdock!”

After walking through this process, I don’t think I should truly call this a found poem, although it had the outlines of it. My first one, described the process this way: “

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.

There you have it. I think it fits in the realm of Found Poetry given the heavy-handedness some poets used to create found poems back in the day.

Sadness on the blogfront

When I resumed blog activity approximately five years ago, I quickly started following a few blogs, like I presume we all do. Perhaps some follow more than others. I have limited bandwidth (and frankly, interest) in following droves of authors. I’ve followed the blog of a close friend for about 15 years, but in this iteration, I think I started with a half dozen. One, a semi-professional photographer appeared to stop publishing, and though I liked his work, easy come/easy go. One, a recovering alcoholic (or addict) became too clever, contrived, wordy, and sporadic. I held on until a few months ago then killed it. Another, a seeming polymath scientist, engineer, programmer, and author of fiction and poems, now posts but every few months (inconstant light). Two remain constant, Bridgette Tales and Ephemeral Elegies, with the latter resuming publishing exquisite poems recently after a long hiatus.

But there are the heart-wrenching ones. As ~~2025 ended~~ Ouch! I just confirmed it was 2024. Wow, that’s difficult to comprehend. In Neil I learned from a compatriot of the ether, and an old man like myself. His blog is still being maintained by the Bridgette referenced above.

And now I find that another First Followed Blog has gone silent, CIMPLE, and I fear the worse. She was battling a vicious, aggressive cancer. She hasn’t posted in 2026. Her once-daily posts had become erratic. I hope she has recovered and decided other things are more important, but…. Here’s to you, CIMPLE. Thanks for the beautiful posts and the photos from Michigan. I miss them.

Inconsistent

Today I found a little spreadsheet app continued to refer to a data range with slightly different cell references. It presented itself when weekly choir music listings all showed the same exact output. Finding first one, than two, and finally four different range references, I converted them to be the same. This was made laborious because I had changed the references in mid-stream, so to speak: when I found the formula didn’t reference enough rows, I just increased the reference then and there without changing the historical references.

A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.

—Ralph Waldo Emerson

Referring not to slavish grip
nor saying we should never slip,
he minds we should not fail to see
facts which die to constancy.
Today I killed both birds ('tis true!),
when facts revealed I'd misconstrued:
my references to data needed
rigid names. If I had heeded,
this past hour would not have passed
with pressure rising, with teethes quite gnashed.
Tomorrow I shall run to ground
All data I can find unsound.

72/100
100 poems in 100 days

Mistflowers

Blue mistflower close up, almost blossomed out. September 2026.

Eagerly awaiting the late September blossoming of the blue mistflowers. One of the reasons: I have a LOT of them!

Large cluster in foreground and another in background are all mistflowers. Grow like weeds but native and beautiful. September 2026.

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.