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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Wednesday, December 30, 2020

Spread Sheet

 

Dec. 30, 2015  (I was 71)

 

                  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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