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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Monday, July 18, 2022

On the forested trail of a moonless night

 

July 18, 2017   (I was 72) 

 

On the forested trail of a moonless night

cautiously ushered by dim flashlight

to emerge under the overwhelming dome of stars

on the open precipice of Halemaumau crater

where fuming pillars of volcanic smoke

rise a thousand feet in fiery spectral colors

and shapes to illustrate any imagined epic 

Down deep in the firepit caldera

demon monkeys leap over bubbling lava

and a distant hiss is part of the silence 

The spirits of many writers here in the past

still sizzle and their accounts spiral again

Though he may not have thought it

it may be Ferlinghetti’s rebirth of wonder

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