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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Saturday, May 8, 2021

At the Goodwill

 

May 8, 2009  (I was 64)

 

At the Goodwill I find the wood desk

I think would fit in your life

You think you chose it but looked to me

to okay the price size and smell

After all it was my car

It meant too goddamned much to you

for me to want to think about

and later at the recycling center

where the workers are so poor

they hide the weight from the homeless

who drag their bags onto the scale

Workers put dollars in their own pockets

for the pounds they do not pay

for the glass for the dirty aluminum and plastic

Pre-empting me you voice no protest

You take the weightless receipt

to the securely barred payment window

and sign for your twenty-two fifty

“Not much to some,” you say

“But for me, icing on the cake”

I look at the piles of stolen redemptions

“Where the fuck’s the cake?”

I ask you

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