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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Tuesday, September 22, 2020

Occurrence at Sea

 

from this week in September, 1976  (I was 31)

 

               Occurrence at Sea

The Titanic has gone down in the waterbed

You made waves and there were no survivors this time

Clifton Webb and Debby Reynolds straight to the vinyl liner

No more to sing about there

 

I was too far gone to observe the individual rituals

Each water logged page of every sunken story print dissolving

Me clinging prone to a rubber raft in another ocean

The warm Mediterranean enclosed by continents

Away from tempestuous North Atlantic whitewater ocean storms

Icebergs with their cold asses beneath the sheet

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