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.


Comments Welcome!

Sunday, December 1, 2019

Chè Discharges the Minister of Literature


December 1, 1974  (I was 30)

   Chè Discharges the Minister of Literature
Revolutionaries have always needed poets
someone to leave the honest hills
a missionary of hope, a distant victory
lungs filled with oxygen beyond this quick breath.

An assignment of rediscovery -consider it-
somewhere beyond dysentery and that distant hill
to know again how it is we are here
among so many strangers so close to home.
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