©2008 onetarot
Wet breeze, leaves falling,
nothing crunches underfoot
but unlucky snails.
Egg yolk sun setting.
Evening smoke from bar-b-cue
making me hungry...
Cobalt blue skies sweep
turkey vultures to their nests.
I kick a feather.
Jupiter watches;
airplane blinking silently.
We move in circles.
2008 onetarot
Dusty window sill
towel flicked at buzzing flies
white corn tortillas
______________________
Flying to the farm
end of summer vacation
flocks of plastic bags
©2008 onetarot
Paper
I write daily, or not, on the paper
milled by the press of my youth;
squeezed from milky pulp, sagebrush
and bubbling, blistered tar; dotted
with chips and veins of dark flotsam:
the sign of some silent collision.
Ink flows from a broken nib, soaking
letters smeared by good intentions,
lazy wrists, spilled juices; sentences
crowd together on the coarse-grained
field, quietly blurring over each other
in a bedlam of black sotto voce.
I hang each sheet up to dry, the
line too light to make much fuss;
stacks of the tattered stuff sit
in empty reams of irreproachable
grace, untouched as they are
by the stroke of a single word.
My internal clock has always been set later than societal convenience. When I was a child I, of course, had a school-night bedtime. After being sent to bed, however, I would be awake and bored to tears for the first hour or two . If I had a source of light I would read, but as they hadn't invented the LED flashlight yet (damn it!) I quickly burned through batteries, leaving me either trying to perceive text via a lukewarm filament, or placing my radio underneath my pillow and listening to Doctor Demento or one of several radio dramas/comedies/variety shows.
The radio shows were all nostalgic reruns of a bygone era (i.e., the late 1930's - early 1960's). Video killed the something something and all that. However, one major series was a contemporary attempt to revitalize the art form: CBS Radio Mystery Theater. Hosted by E.G. Marshall (and later by Tammy Grimes), the series ran from 1975 to 1982 with -- get this -- 1,399 original shows plus reruns; 2,969 episodes altogether.
I have found a website that contains mp3's of each episode. The link has gone into my link list on the right of your screen.
The nostalgia is overwhelming!
____________________
Edit: I should add that in addition to CBS Radio Mystery Theater, there was one other contemporary radio drama playing, in three minute segments, if you knew where to listen for it: this one.
I know how to pack for travel,
but how do you pack to stay?
Huffing Central Coast fog is a wonderful natural high, but...
...it's very bad for the eyesight.
©2008 onetarot
Certainly my reputation,
my fetishistic appreciation,
if you will, for tight places
paces me two steps behind.
This, though, is preposterous:
fissures so extremely thin
you couldn’t push spring water in,
much less more substantial stuff.
But that’s the trick, now, isn’t it.
They expect your blood or spit
to do the work of tooth and nail.
How effortless it is to fail.
I cannot fathom, it isn’t in me,
but misery, it loves gravity.
Of that weird fluid we abound;
spilling on too-solid ground.
Actually seen on a Virginia licence plate travelling north on Hwy 1 --
VABYCH
How that got through the DMV I can't imagine.
"I believe I found the missing link between animal and civilized man. It is us."
-----Konrad Lorenz, Nobel Laureate
©2008 onetarot Drawing a blade
across the mirror’s
speckled field,
a single tooth
of shaving cream
falls onto the water
splitting it
gasp
wide open.
