back from hiatus

I took a short break.  Sat in Jury Duty, sat at home depressed all weekend. Today, rediscovering coffee.

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Thinking of attempting work on a new poem project.  Last February, when I hadn't completed a poem in, quite literally, years, I began writing again--quite a lot of poems, of varying quality.  The point was, though--I was finally writing.  I carried this out on and off until sometime around mid-summer.  Well, till around the time my life got shaken up and the Big Change came.   The rules were simple--these were to be 5-minute poems, no revision allowed mid-writing.   Necessarily they were short, mostly "talky" in tone, mostly in the voice of not a mystical poetic speaker, but me, Tony.

Now I'm thinking of trying to collect that batch, doing some revising and winnowing, and seeing if I don't come up with something at least somewhat interesting.  Have just more or less "completed" a project, I'm looking toward another--this might be a good place to begin.

In any case, here's a sample, which I have posted, in the past on the ol' FB wall.

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June Rain, Laments



I'm breaking stuff up into little pieces
while the rain sluices, if that's a word,
outside in a supposed June.

Summer never comes to this town. Instead
we get despair, or we feign contentment.
I never get tired of the the plum trees.

It's a joint operation, this.  God conspires
with an ugly force, or maybe God is an ugly
force. But it takes us away from our childhoods.

I once stood on a fishing boat with my father,
7 years old and marveling at a shark on the line.
We never reeled it in and after, we got pizza.

This is what my adult life has been like. I could
never reel in my father. He remains adrift, aging,
nearly dead, toothless, and astonishingly inert.

One of these days, I'll sit and write a letter.
One of these days, it will be too late.
The rain doesn't care though. It will fall.