Compulsively Aimless

Posting a wonderful crop of June poems.  Free Information Technologists say information wants to be free Tyrants want information kept under lock and key         Information lives best in its natural habitat running wild in giant herds like wildebeests on the African Savannah Who would want mass-produced information from industrial information farms rounded up and branded, processed and packaged and served with unknown ingredients? We need free-range, organic information allowed to grow and roam unimpeded, uncorrupted. That's the information for us. Your Call Is Very Important to Us I know they think of little else but my call. So important it can’t be trusted to unreliable humans.     Computer-generated almost human transmissions that deliver sincerity. That’s the sound of automated caring.   Growing Pains   Everything is smaller screens tweets attention except information now unleashed.

The monument makers said they could match the size and style of my sister's tombstone even though it's been forty-five years since they made the last one for my grandmother. But the hill in the back yard of our old house shrank to a slight gradient Time can shrink houses, trees and yards but we can still make our monuments the same size.

Because we cannot talk anymore I send you a cloud and in conversation you send one back Our talk could be anything from sleek stratus in the morning to a flotilla of billowing cumulous in the afternoon My favorites are on Saturdays if the sky is blue I like to start off with high-flying streaks of cirrus and you answer at sunset with impeccable timing in red-orange nimbus trimmed in gold. I'm always watching the sky.

  FLAT TIRE When your daughter gets a flat tire at 10:30 on a Monday night you get to grab a flashlight and go out and press your face into the pavement into little pieces of gravel and smell that cold pavement smell. You thought you'd teach her to change a flat but you never did you send her home with her mother in the other car without the flat. You fumble in the dark with the untested jack cranking your Japanese SUV into the air by a few inches pull the flat off the lugs roll it onto the ground and struggle to align the good one and twist the nuts on as tight as possible with your hands "Always use your hands before you use a tool," your eighth grade Shop teacher once said. Two days later you're still cleaning road grit from the grooves of your fingers which remind you of the treads of tires.

I mow my lawn
  in concentric squares  shrinking green tufts 
into a disappearing island But no lawn is an island why not past my boundaries to the neighbor’s yard I'll need to take time off from work
 as I race up and down
 suburban streets
 connecting rivers of lawn with the Capitol lawn, New England town greens. and Kentucky bluegrass which requires a stately pace
  to please pampered thoroughbreds. In the midwest coliseums
 100 yards are precisely coifed 
 Is it any wonder artificial turf 
was abandoned  and returned to grass and earth? Where are the dreams in artificial turf? My vast grid  extends to summer lawns of memory front yards of modest Ohio towns 
and to graveyards of my grandparents. I mow Little League fields in diagonal textures the kind you see on during the baseball highlights. I'm left mowing in the dark
 one giant island of the great republic
 with rolling lawns --from sea to shinin...