I don’t write in a journal everyday, but I have accumulated many entries over the past 50+ years beginning in 1966. Some items evolved into longer works. Among the leftovers little pieces survived. I thought a collection of these with a piece culled from the same date in a past year would make an interesting yearbook. The consistencies and inconsistencies of mind, skipping back and forth across time, provide varied perspectives. It is difficult to remember the context of the past we’ve lived; we also make suppositions about times that predate ourselves.

The few alterations from original drafts were to improve clarity. The worst of my work is not included. There remains enough mediocrity and immaturity to make me feel humble and you feel smart. There are also moments of accidental insight and incidental humor.

Author Stephen Crane referred to his little pieces as pills…apparently they were small and somewhat hard to swallow, but good for you.


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Sunday, December 30, 2018

Spread Sheet


Dec. 30, 2017  (I was 73)

                        Spread Sheet

The accountant sets the figures in rows and columns
The arrangement of these ranks and files
is a story to be understood
swift smooth forward movements of addition
Leaps of multiplication make future projections
Offsets are deficits backtracking subtractions
that tell a different tale tone and direction
revelations on the other side of the point
The accountant knows fractions are where lives are lived
in the minutiae of the daily entry
that very human attempt to measure profit and loss
extending the graph of the big picture
once confined to a cabinet now stored in a cloud
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