Archive for March 11th, 2011
Versatile Blogger Award – People who Keep Me Going
Posted by Carl in Essays, Finding Purpose on March 11, 2011
Thank you to Seabell for the award nomination, cheering me into spring!
7 Random Facts About Me:
- I dreamed of being a successful composer years ago and obtained my degree in music composition. I was diverted by the need for money (and lack of talent), but I love to create anything, whatever the medium.
- I really do try to write poems on happy topics. Sometimes.
- I have five dogs at home and would have more if it were not for the restraint of my wife. My wife and I also own a dog daycare and boarding business, which is a lot of fun but not a get-rich-quick scheme, so I still work my day job in banking compliance.
- I LOVE racing on two wheels and four wheels, with or without motors, but I should say I love WATCHING racing. I’m not a gear head, but I love contests that involve humans, machines, nature (yes, rain, dirt, ice, snow, and TREES!), and that have far more than two teams. I like human drama. I also love watching hockey and I love playing racquetball.
- I’m thinking of a dramatic career change and I am way too old to do that.
- This is my second blog. My first one, which was terminated in 2004 sometime, explored politics, racing and music, mostly politics. Politics wore me down, beat me up, discouraged me, and made me realize that there are far better ways to do life. I want this to be a place where I can write about trying to live life whether through poetry, fiction, essays, painting or photography. NO POLITICS for me but I can’t say the same for racing and music.
- My general impression is that I am quite undeserving of these types of awards, but I fight that impression because I want to be part of a community.
Now, here are some bloggers I’d love to honor with the award even if it’s not their kind of thing and even if they’ve received it 19 times already, which I’ve learned is the nature of these kinds of things. These people keep me challenged, keep me encouraged, keep me going, and I’d say keep me alive but you’d think me a drama queen:
- Evelyn (a masterful teacher)
- Eric
- Victoria at liv2write2day (she is so generous with her time)
- Marian at Runaway Sentence
- Heather at Where the Butterflies Go (another kind and generous soul)
- Kathy at darlinblog
- Adam at The Dustus Blog
- Raven
- kolembo
- Claudia at SPLITTERGEWITTER
- Southern Musings
- the tenth muse
- Scribbla
- Reading and Writing by Pub Light
- rockpoolpoetry
- Read Between the Minds
- Lynnaima’s Blog
Thanks again to Seabell for the nice award!
Survey of the Wicked Tree
There’s an old mean tree
in front of my mental hospital.
All of the branches are angry,
every single one.
March, and it won’t have leaves this summer,
Round pods, perhaps for seeds,
look like death stars. One bombs you,
you’re dead. You are. Try to count them.
Stands over the Buddhist garden,
the garden in deep fear,
looking intimidated,
shivering, naked and lonely.
I long for a place that looks like a place
that will make me better.
Does it need Adirondack chairs?
Does it need something that protests loudly
that we might survive the death of our winter?
Your Computer Fools You
Your computer loves to fool you, play tricks.
You thought random radio, Nine Inch Nails Channel,
would boost your energy, would get you to work,
but those chips they found all the evil,
they serenaded you with the world’s hate,
and all of the world hates you to pieces.
The house crawls with the silence of aloneness,
disturbed by dogs dreaming, twitching their legs
violently, and you are floating below the floors.
There is beauty to the day outside the windows,
but it is frigid, and isn’t that how your world is?
Look at the beauty but do not touch it.
Your pattern, you swim into the stream of cyanide
with hornets flowing low and aggressively from the hotel.
A man in a blue truck that looks like a vicious truck
from the movies with all of the violent killing,
and the driver is big-bellied, with angry German
mustache and arms flailing like jelly fish.
You play cowboys and Indians and no one
joins you but the arrows are heading crooked
through the streams of hornets looking to lose
stingers, you watching your CD player obliviously,
hoping for more Nine Inch Nails, knowing that
there is no medicine for you and no good music.
stillfugue 