November 22

JELLYFISH AND PEANUT BUTTER CARDS

Jellyfish and peanut butter cards make for busy days and cheerful nights, sunlit at the beach and lantern light filled with double-decker solitaire.  Camping as a way of life suits some as they run from their lives.  For the more balanced, camp is a temporary retreat.  To the overly invested, camping is an aberration, a threat to the foundations of civilization as we know it.  I can take a bit of sand in my hair, smoke in the air.  Though I do dread the feeling of coming back to the life I love and feeling like a stranger.  Temporary disengagement estranges me from the place, the things, the dog.  I need time away, variety of experience, expanded horizons.  I need my entrenched home life.  I need it all and must accept the clock never stops running anyplace on the planet even if I am enjoying a good game with sticky camp cards, regaling tales of man-of-war.

Don’t break your wishbone.

*

One and One

The person who has nothing is vague.

The person who has too much alludes.

And these people may falsely mistake one another

for kindred when what you draw your conclusions from

are the poems and sweet words,

which flow out of these divergent folk.

A paper house is built, but the living is impossible.

Tying strings to dreams doesn’t permit you

to fly away to fairylands it just leaves you prone

to lightening strikes and long wet wicks.

What could be the truth unfolded;

spread broadly for all to see?

Where could the roads so very far apart

lead to a home, a hearth, a life?

Or is this just a field of fantasy flowers blooming in our minds?

Mist is vapor pretending at a marriage

to a world it will soon evaporate and leave.

You and I are passing ships on a short sad night.