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, March 13, 2022

Themes of a Life

 

March 13, 1987  (I was 42)

 

         Themes of a Life

   (Escape of the thrilled soul)

 

The themes of a life fall upon me this morning;

begun as hard phrases for ideas found in youth,

they glare through blue windshield off wet pavement

momentarily blinding me once more in the spring.

 

Cheap Thrills, excursions of extremism,

a few footfalls beyond the bounds of convention,

taken as regularly as medicine

to reveal the arbitrary values upon which judgments lie

until pedestrian habit becomes cynical addiction.

 

Battling the Demons, little evils allowed to inhabit us

because we proudly remember Hemingway had them,

and their stings were so innocuous.

Age begins to understand persistence

and respect has made the little devils grow.

 

Dreams of Flying, any dreams really

that linger into the morning and take possession,

extending their insistent reality upon the dreamer’s conscious actions.

Dreams are the art of the soul, and to dream of flying

is undeniably to fly for the space of the dream, perhaps beyond.

 

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