Compulsively Aimless

Napoleon said that he could always recover lost space but never lost time.   At the battle of Gettysburg, 215 of 262 members of the Minnesota First Volunteers became casualties charging against a Confederate force that was six times its size.   Union General Hancock ordered them to charge all because he needed 15 more minutes to reinforce an open gap in the Federal lines. Vince Lombardi never conceded defeat, only admitting “we ran of time.”   Steven Jobs declared the most precious resource human beings have is time.   T his morning, I hit the snooze button for a handful of minutes that I’ll never remember.  

Humans invented words to help remember and communicate.   Socrates was a curmudgeon about it all and thought transforming words into writing would make our memories lazy.   More words got invented expanding our vocabularies.   Great ideas were turned into words that stood the test of time– The Ten Commandments, War and Peace , grandmother’s recipe for fudge.   Along the way, we fell in love with words and wrote poems.   We selected words for sound and meaning.   In modern times, daily newspapers shorted the lifespan of the written word to 24 hours.   More recently, social media shortened a word’s duration to only a few minutes.   Words buried other words under a nonstop and accelerating stream of updates that are themselves quickly forgotten.   What’s next for words?   Will they move fast enough for us?   Carry enough meaning?   Will the written word die off and we go back to using pictures like our ancien...

    Time won’t come out to play It won’t bargain for a return trip or make an exchange of …a year, a week, a day For any reason No matter how devout Wrongly condemned prisoners Released after decades Must hate time For not opening up And giving back what everyone agrees should not have been taken Or a persistent old scientist rediscovering a forgotten element He once encountered as a young lab assistant The one that could have made all the difference to his life experiment Killjoy time Has firm rules against a do-over. And I suppose it likes having sayings written about itself… If I knew now what I knew then… Making up for lost time… Since time won’t play along I compensate in the present   Willing as much experience into a single moment   as can be allowed. Take that -- time.

DOUBLE CORNER LOT They’re demolishing the brick colonial The one on the double corner lot That stood for 75 years For two generations of one family. They’re cutting down that 150 year-old maple The one that stands in corner of the double corner lot One tree, 150 rings Shade from spring to fall. The tree goes first It took them all day To chop off its limbs Cut down its trunk And grind up its stump. A perfectly good tree Offering up another generation of green in May To the brick house in the corner of the double corner lot 150 years gone in a day. The house goes second It took them two days To smash its brick and mortar The second floor first The first floor last. A perfectly good brick home Ready to offer shelter to another family On the corner lot 75 years gone in two days.  For more poems see http://www.verse-virtual.com/john-kropf.html

  A Boy's Lost Instructions There was a final time when you said, “I’m going out to play.” But you never realized it was final...  1.  Parachute Man My Grandfather fell to earth in a WWI parachute fifty years later he taught me how to make a parachute man with a handkerchief, string and a lead sinker You folded the handkerchief in squares and tossed your parachute man into the air Nowadays most men don't carry handkerchiefs. 2.  Talking to Kites My father showed me how to send messages up to kites He used old memo pads with his company logo on them and we'd write notes How are things up there? tear and tape the sheets around the kite string He'd give it a slide up the line and off it would go spinning around till the message was delivered. Today stunt kite flyers would not sit still to send a message. 3.  Burning Buildings In the fall we would burn piles of leaves. Sometimes my father would clean old boxes from th...

                              Lake Michigan Rock Mineral striations of green, red and brown compressed into a sleek shape minding its own business since the Precambrian Era present for the movement of glaciers across the landscape unknown to me until twenty summers ago when I pocketed that formation of history and art and took it home to hold as a paperweight. For more poems go to http://www.verse-virtual.com/john-kropf.html

                      Photo (c) John Kropf   Two new poems of adventure near and far.     Backyard  Everyone should have a backyard at least once in life You can dig to China Play badminton Tend to your hydrangeas Pitch a tent and camp out with your best friend Mow a lawn Sun bathe with a cool drink and if you wait long enough watch the stars and galaxies reveal themselves You can rake leaves and send them back into the sky by bonfire And if you ever dig all the way to China you could end up in someone's backyard. 042214 __________________________________________________ Lost City To the untrained eye it was nothing But when I heard they found the lost city covered in the sands of the high desert I thought of the last inhabitant on his last night inside the the city walls and how he walked away from its crumbling ruins into the morning sun turning the city into a tomb...