Compulsively Aimless

A Short Collection of Summer  Traveler Over the eastern Dakotas the winds exhale a cotton ball cloud and push it along over wheat and rivers just in time to notice while finishing The Detroit News and a cup of cold coffee on a Michigan hillside. Chain of Causation The daughters paddled their vacation kayaks so far out the mothers got excited and made the fathers chase them in kayaks It was the daughters plan Laughing the whole time. Right Time, Right Place Drifting on the on a yellow raft floating on the blue earth swirling in the white galaxy was the place to be that Sunday. Some Words in the Dark Evening is a wholesome sunset then Old Grandad, mosquitoes and clumps of conversation The darker it gets the more the conversation opens up until we’re just outlines of figures silenced by lighting and bellow of thunder on the western sky Postscript No wonder the Ojibwa on this land had Animikii, a bird who caused thunder with the...

Washington’s Second Alarm Sometime around nautical dawn Blackbirds and Cardinals sing and respond before the rest of us sleeping civil servants can see. An unknown audience hearing unwritten songs While we lie back in our beds small gods fly over our neighborhoods and land wherever they like. But at exactly Six AM Delta’s New York Shuttle makes its final approach sounding like a dull tornado rolling down on the banks of the Potomac Everyone aboard has stowed tray tables in upright and locked positions with no knowledge the slumbering government workforce will tell time by their descent to runway nineteen.  

We lost the bet on our stone-age dignity So we bred new ones to strike dream poses and dress up in adult clothes then taught them to write from inside the eye of the storm and if they weren’t scared enough we surrounded them with lunatic conspiracies and gore and sent them traveling overland past the village of broken bells where there will be no promised safe house only a forbidden machine in a landscape of original sin while predators come down from the mountains to taste the hearts of the innocent.

WESTERLY COURSE Driving west into an unknown country is a deliberate mystery You don't know  what you'll need or what you'll find on the radio The land pushes up green waves  and sand hills where birds hide  during the day and you hear them  at night. At the end is the ocean where the sun says enough--time to sit still on the shore  and let the waves do the talking.

On Farragut Square  Daylight turns to darkness and man made lights turn on along the Avenue  Admiral Farragut is standing here as a statue silhouetted high on a plinth because he sent his fleet forward  and damning the torpedoes  It's about this time fleets of FedEx and UPS trucks double park around the square damning the traffic as they load their cargoes  and sail into the sea of highways on an evening breeze.

  Book TV Whenever I watch TV shows like Downton Abbey I notice the magnificent libraries lined with leather-bound books I usually pick out a book from the highest shelf and wonder what’s on page one There are so many Who picked them out Do some never get read Have others given inspiration to the reader to break away and do something new maybe there’s a missing book left on a train Do the books stay with the house like part of its red blood cells giving the rooms life or do they get sold off in hard times with the furnishings Maybe they could write a whole episode on a book in the library.