031.366 - 2016 project and appreciation

every day in 2016, write a sentence or a paragraph or a poem that inspires or appreciates

our futon (by Ikea)

goddam, it's comfortable!  has been for over twenty-five years!  it's so comfortable I've been known to just lie down and slide into sleep after telling Lindy what all I had left to do "today".  I've been known to oversleep - a friend of mine challenges "what is oversleep?  how can one possibly oversleep?" - by a couple of hours for no other excuse than how comfortable it is!  it has provided good nesting for thousands of hours of sleep so far and appears to be good for thousands more!

030.366 - 2016 project and inspiration

every day in 2016, write a sentence or a paragraph or a poem that inspires or appreciates

Look.  Some soldiers marching home.  They carry dignity and pride and commitment with them, and some shared bond we cannot fathom.  It's not the particulars of what each has done nor in what country that I see but the nobility of that commitment, dignity, and pride, and that shared bond.  They would kill for each other, they would die for each other.  They, the finest that we can produce, stand apart from the rest of us.

029.366 - 2016 project and appreciation

every day in 2016, write a sentence or a paragraph or a poem that inspires or appreciates

computer technologists, hardware and software

thank you, technologists for expanding the capabilities of computer hardware and software all my life, but especially all my working life.   you gave me so many challenges and puzzles to solve that you filled my working life with purpose and satisfaction.  and my retiring didn't slow you down a bit!  thank you.  keep up the good work!

028.366 - 2016 project and inspiration

every day in 2016, write a sentence or a paragraph or a poem that inspires or appreciates

Hear that?  Everyone knows that sound, leaves fluttering in a breeze, sometimes a breeze you can barely feel.  In this case, a sound only you can hear.  The world waiting, on tiptoe, fingernails tingling, waiting to see or hear what you will do with, there!  That word!  The one that just caught your attention, the beginning of a new poem, a new story, a new hymn, a new anthem!  Write it!  What are you waiting for?

027.366 - 2016 project and appreciation

every day in 2016 write a sentence or a paragraph or a poem that inspires or appreciates

Suzanne Lummis and everyone who participated in the reading tonight at the World Stage

(The features were poets from Suzanne's new anthology, _Wide Awake_)

OMG, what an amazing reading!  Suzanne, thank you, the anthology really is top notch, excellent poems from damn fine poets!  Features, thank you for so generously reading a poem from someone not there as well as your own work from the anthology.  Conney, what a marvelous celebration of Suzanne as Los Angeles!  Open mic participants, thank you for stepping up your game to follow such wonderful features.  Thank you too, people who put this show together and hosted it for us.   Wonderful, wonderful, wonderful!

026.366 - 2016 project and inspiration

every day in 2016, write a sentence or a paragraph or a poem that inspires or appreciates.

there in your quiet place, there in your safe space, wait.  how long?  that depends on your resistance.  wait.  the word comes.  then another.  then you have a beginning.  now write.

025.366 - 2016 project and appreciation

every day in 2016, write a sentence or a paragraph or a poem that inspires or appreciates

the good folks at Kaiser-Permanente

who kept me from dying of congestive heart failure, who got my boot off still usable after I shattered both bones of my lower left leg, who put my leg back together again, and who daily do that and more for hundreds of patients, thank you.  Thank you.

024.366 - 2016 project and inspiration

every day in 2016, write a sentence or a paragraph or a poem that inspires or appreciates

start now.  start with what you have.  a paper, a pen, your mind, solitude, quiet.  yes, you can shut out the world to find your solitude and your quiet.  be still.  a word comes to you like a butterfly to a flower.  write it down.  you have begun.

023.366 - 2016 project and appreciation

every day in 2016, write a sentence or a paragraph or a poem that inspires or appreciates

Harley-Davidson

112 years old now, your company makes some of the most beautiful motorcycles in the world, and makes motorcycles that sound like no others.  For 22 years, I think, I rode a succession of three Harleys on freeways, on highways, on streets, on roads, even on trails.  I rode them in forests, on mountains, in deserts, in rural country, in towns, and in cities.  I rode the coast highway up to San Francisco, I took a 7700-mile, seven-week ride that made a kind of lasso-loop around the middle of the forty-eight contiguous states.  I rode to Albuquerque and back, to Oakland and back.  I rode to work and back nearly every day for most of those years.  Goddam, I loved those three motorcycles, and I loved riding them.  Harley-Davidson, I salute you.  You make damn fine motorcycles, and you nourish their mystique!  Go Harley!

022.366 - 2016 project and inspiration

every day in 2016, write a sentence or a paragraph or a poem that inspires or appreciates

they're coming for us....  they're crawling out of the cracks under the window frames, slipping out from under the panelling, they're oozing out of the floor moldings, and marching down the chain to the chandelier.  What are they? Not ideas but the kernels of ideas, looking for a mind to hatch in.  Go ahead.  Scoop one up.  Probably two or three others will jump onto your hand also.   They'll all run under your sleeve and begin their merry trip to your mind.  You could be more passive.  Lie down and take a nap.  Let them burrow in under your hair.  The trip is shorter that way. Now let them ferment.  Provide juice for ideas.  But pay attention!  What good does it do them to present you ideas one after another while you watch television or gaze out your window?   There!  Isn't that one now?  Write it down and catch the next!  Keep writing until they run out.  Whew!  Now you have a week's worth of writing to do!

021.366 - 2016 project and appreciation

every day in 2016, write a sentence or a paragraph or a poem that inspires or appreciates

Miz V, V, Venela - however you know her

V is that person who, when nearly everyone around you has given up on the humanity of humans, reminds us of it, who reaches deep into herself and brings forth a pearl of wisdom or of wit that makes you wince with the compassion and comprehension of it, who looks up over her glasses at you and reminds you you ain't got nobody to look down on, not while she's nearby.

020.366 - 2016 project and inspiration

every day in 2016, write a sentence or a paragraph or a poem that inspires or appreciates

be who you wish you were.  take the stand you'd take if you were only (fill in the blank).  declare yourself.  then do.  yep, you let everyone know "this is who I am", then you damn well better live into it.  go ahead.  you may scare yourself, but secretly nearly everyone wants you to win.  go!

019.366 - 2016 project and appreciation

Every day in 2016, write a sentence or a paragraph or a poem that inspires or appreciates

A toast to Jaha Zainabu who makes herself felt as a presence, who calls others to confidence and power, who encourages better, clearer, more moving poems, and who paints abstracts which aren't and that call us to community.

018.366 - 2016 project and inspiration

Every day in 2016, write a sentence or a paragraph or a poem that inspires or appreciates.

At your core, you're an optimist.  How do I know?  You're still alive.  (I am, and on normal days, I think I'm a pessimist.)  Find that core.  Kindle that spark.  Find what you can stand for that is worth living for.  Write that.  Write!

017.366 - 2016 project and appreciation

Every day in 2016, write a sentence or a paragraph or a poem that inspires or appreciates.

Poets feed the people

Omg!  Omg!  OMG!  Do you know the World Stage practice of "one, two, three, DAMN!"?  It celebrates a poet, a poem, a performance in which everything comes together like you'd want it to, one in which you in the audience achieve catharsis.  It's pretty special.  Last night we had that five times for five poets.  We walked out not knowing whether we wanted more or silence for about a year.  It was wonderful!  Thank you, Hiram Sims for putting it on.  Thank you A Kold Piece for hosting it.  Thank you Connie, V, Angela, Eternal Mind, and Food4Thot - dear god, thank you! - for bringing your best.     <bow>     <namaste>

016.366 - 2016 project and inspiration

Every day in 2016, write a sentence or a paragraph or a poem that inspires or appreciates.

After "Poets Feed the People"

Some afternoons, some nights, you are lucky enough to be there when the poets giving readings are on fire.  You give thanks, you appreciate the poets and the host, even the venue manager if he or she is there.  And you go home and work at saying what you saw, what you heard, how their words wormed in through your earholes and burrowed right for your heart, your mind, your imagination, and lo, what was already a garden became a dazzle, a fireworks, a symphony, and your pen or keyboard hardly knows what to do with it.  Don't quit!  Capture that!  Even if you have to go back and polish it, edit it, trim it to the bone, even if you have to go back and re-language it.  But get down that caught-fire feeling, that doubly-cleared mind thinking, the new images and sounds you now have.  Re-read it.  Send a mental prayer to the poets who gave you this.  Then wake in the morning and rekindle that fire, reclear your mind, find newer images and metaphors, and work with those a while.  Let the performances simmer in you, so you can pass them on in your own work and newly honor those on-fire poets!

015.366 - 2016 project and appreciation

every day in 2016, write a sentence a paragraph or a poem that inspires or appreciates

Luis J. Rodriguez

He found a low road to transcendence, built a life dedicated to family, friends, neighborhood, and others out of passing through drugs, gangs, prison, and his own death.  He found commitment and humanity from digging as low as he could in rejection and maybe narcissism.  He gives us poetry, a bookstore, community, education, and compassion.  El es un hombre de verdad.

014.366 - 2016 project and inspiration

every day in 2016, write a sentence or a paragraph or a poem that inspires or appreciates

out of the dark at the core of you
where nothing exists and everything is possible
bring forth, squealing, what your life work will be
and while you're at it, an idea for a poem

013.366 - 2016 project and appreciation

every day in 2016, write a sentence or a paragraph or a poem that inspires or appreciates

William Carlos Williams

I should probably read his biography.  I mean the book-length story of his life, not the blurb in Poetry magazine or the Wikipedia.  He went to the University of Pennsylvania and found Ezra Pound there as a fellow student.  What an impossibly lucky incident!  They became friends for life.  But he didn't write "shadow of Ezra" poems or "mirror of Whitman" poems.  He experimented and experimented, and found his own way to write poems, poems in the language of his patients, working people in Rutherford, New Jersey, and poor people in New York City, poems full of compassion and down-to-earth humanity, poems that make you stop and see new colors in your own world, new grit in your own world, poems that shift your own perspective so you can never quite regain your old one, and don't miss it.

012.366 - 2016 project and inspiration

every day in 2016, write a sentence or a paragraph or a poem that inspires or appreciates

Most of what we do is a waste of time and energy.  We and a thousand others build a dike, and a hurricane blows it apart and another thousand workers have to start over.  But someday a last thousand workers will assemble a dike that the ocean can only wear away at, and if people will just maintain it, that dike will stand and stand and stand.  Courage and optimism build that dike, then rebuild it, then rebuild it again.  I wish you courage and optimism building whatever dike you're building.  Whether it's the last dike to be built or not, may you and your co-workers build the best damn dike you can!

011.366 - 2016 project and appreciation

every day in 2016, write a sentence or a paragraph or a poem that inspires or appreciates

Judges!

Not the book in the Bible, although that's a fine institution itself, but the women and men who sit on the bench and wear the robe, and who adjudicate how the law applies in specific cases and in classes of cases.  Overall we are well served by these men and women who do not make the law, who do not enforce the law, but who referee how cases proceed, and who sentence convicted people, and who later review what has been done in lower courts and whether it has been done well.  By and large, they apply the law, which is what we ask of them, and now and then they apply the law with mercy, and I am awed.

010.366 - new project and inspiration

every day in 2016, write a sentence or a paragraph or a poem that inspires or appreciates

The cowboys, the outlaws, the bandidos, whoever they were, rode into town.  They whooped and hollered and yelled and shouted, they shot their guns into the air, they took over the center of town.  They drank beer and whiskey and rum and brandy and even tequila.  They stirred up the bands to play their rowdiest songs.  They danced with each other and they danced with the bar girls and they danced with the girls who peeked into the bars out of curiosity.  They even went out into the neighborhood and found girls they brought back to drink and dance with them.  They had a helluva good time, the people who drank and danced with them had variations on a helluva good time, depending on how many inhibitions they could drop for an evening and a night.  And in the morning, some very tired and drunk and hungover cowboys slowly mounted and rode out of town, but among them were more than a few grins and smiles, and even one cowboy who laughed out loud!  Be that cowboy.  Be any one of those cowboys.  Have a helluva good time and drag people around you into having variations on a helluva good time, then ride away weary, drunk, hungover, but grinning, smiling, or laughing.  Have you something better to do?

009.366 - new project and appreciation

every day in 2016, write a sentence or a paragraph or a poem that inspires or appreciates

WordPress

Wow!  A website content management system that makes so much sense!  Even I can use it!  (My background is coding in assembly language and C, then struggling to learn HTML and CSS.  Having the program handle the details almost feels like cheating.)  And it's open source!  Bless you programmers for having done such a magnificent job!  For thinking so much like a user would!  I so admire what you've accomplished!

008.366 - new project and inspiration

every day in 2016, write a sentence or a paragraph or a poem that inspires or appreciates

let the mind open.  let it breathe.  leave it alone in the presence of your mentors, your guides, your sacred ones, and the universe.  wait.  a word comes, then another, then a stream of them and images and metaphors all atumble.  pick.  choose.  there is your poem.  there is your life.

007.366 - new project and appreciation

every day in 2016, write a sentence or a paragraph or a poem that inspires or appreciates

consider Jessica Ceballos, and Karineh Mahdessian:

thank you, ladies, for your energy, your verve, your creativity, not only in your poetry, but in what serves community.  may you continue to generate centripetal force!  may people see you for the centers you are!

006.366 - new project and inspiration

every day in 2016, write a sentence or a paragraph or a poem that appreciates or inspires

               Everybody knows the deal is rotten
                         Leonard Cohen

you look at the world, and after a while you conclude it ain't what you was told, the only thing you can count on is dying.  now at that time, one of the temptations is just not to  play any more, but another is to play full out, what the hell, what more are they gonna take away?  play hard!  play harder!  play hardest!  Go!  Go!  Go!

005.366 - new project and appreciation

every day in 2016 write a sentence or a paragraph or a poem that inspires or appreciates

Bless "the mothers," those generous ladies who each month prepare the spread of food, drink, and whatnots that precede and accompany the event called "The Last Sunday" in Culver City!  What a fine job they do!  What a savory combination of party foods they prepare!  What hospitality they bring to that event!  Thank you.

004.366 - new project and inspiration

every day in 2016 write a sentence or a paragraph or a poem that inspires or appreciates

brothers and sisters:

write you a poem that wrings language within an iota of its life, pare out the softnesses you included accidentally, appreciate a brother or a sister, appreciate somebody's work, appreciate one of your own poems, dig down to what pulled you into poetry first, then dig deeper. when you find the pearl, stop, admire, write that!

003.366 - new project and appreciation

every day in 2016 write a sentence, a paragraph or a poem that inspires or appreciates

Once upon a time, let us ignore the reasons why, roughly fifty-five men gathered and in some ways acted like a bunch of politicians, which they were, but in some ways acted like a bunch of wise men, which they were not, and when they were done, they had started us on the trip toward being a potentially great nation.

002.366 - new project and inspiration

every day in 2016 write a sentence or a paragraph or a poem that inspires or appreciates

Oh my people!

Kindness and mercy, thoughtfulness and respect, you grant these without thought some days, some times.  Grant them with thought.  Grant them on purpose.  When?  When it least concerns you.  When you gain nothing from it;.  Then you outdo the gods.  Go, my people.  Act kindly, with mercy, take care of each other, and respect strangers and the barely known.  Do not expect the gods to bless you in return, this is not the way of gods.  This is the way of humans acting at their best.  Spread generosity.

001.366 - new project and appreciation

every day in 2016 write a sentence or a paragraph or a poem that inspires or appreciates

To poets in Los Angeles

Since January 2010, when I showed up at Rick Lupert's "Cobalt Cafe" reading, then Jason Brain's "Soapbox Sessions", you have welcomed me in - like making room for one more on a crowded dance floor - and let me join your dance.  Thank you.

366.365 - encore

some things done require
a celebration
a "one  more for the road!"
an additional bow
count then this as one of those
imagine a huge bouquet hurled aloft
so individual flowers drift down to you
and you can decide what to do with yours
imagine a magician beaming at you
showing once again his empty sleeves
then pulling another flower from the air
let this be that blossom
inhale the scent
and feel it move
down toward your fingertips
as curtain falls