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THURSDAY 30th & FRIDAY 31st
Click here for details of
the "Broadway Goes to the Movies" show |
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Rod on Maui, August 2003.
Photo by John Scoggins.
©2003 by Stanyan Entertainment.
A Thought for Today
There are choices and choices that go
wanting. We wouldn't know of ghosts without the haunting.
AT LAST
It’s hard to express how relieved I am to have finally finished
Rusting in the Rain and most of all to be satisfied with it. Lets hope I
still feel the same way the first week in December when finished copies
arrive. It was completed at 1:10 AM this morning. I had a good sleep then
finished another poem that I decided to make room for. That won’t happen
again because the book goes off to the printer tomorrow morning.
I decided to give you another taste of the new book today, so after the
paragraph from Little Towns & Pretty Places you will find “August Asks for
Little,” from a section in Rusting in the Rain called Arms full of
Augusts. I hope you like it.
And finally because Halloween weekend is upon us a poem entitled A Jack O’
Lantern of One’s Own. I hope to see some of you on Saturday night at the
William Holden Wildlife Foundation benefit.
Little Towns & Pretty Places
#3 in an ongoing series
MOVING THROUGH AMERICA
The Holy Ghost goes with you for the ride. He too is curious about The
States. Will there be American dreams enough to go around? There will be
if people seek them out. A looking’s all it takes. The dream lies
everywhere and one of two keys fits the lock. Perseverance or imagination.
So even when the door is double–locked, the chance to realize the dream is
there.
– from Little Towns & Pretty Places, Previously Unpublished
August Asks for Little
I marvel
at the wonders of the day;
the dalliance of daisies in the valley
just below the hill,
the odor of the earth, my ardor
for you as you lie awake against it.
Above your citron–breasts
the nearly cloudless sky is treated
to that honey mouth I traverse often.
I have memorized your soft
and nearly alabaster belly.
I fall asleep against it
even when I am away.
Just now my head’s upon it and my lips
part to your skin.
As the afternoon glides on love’s weight
does not worry us, it conquers the minute,
compliments the hour.
August asks for little and is not
easily impressed.
If a bright palanquin passed by with heaven
held aloft within it August would only nod.
This lazy month is slow to notice niceties
but it admires the bravery of love.
And now
the night is coupling with the body
of the world
and we have moved from hillside
to the fire.
For those who lie alone this night, a prayer,
that whomever you are waiting for
comes soon and brings along a pocketful
of stars to scatter in your wake on every
dusky eve like this that looms ahead.
Your love continues to sedate me. My arm
across your shoulder has united us as one.
Crows are crawling through the trees
to nests they made ten years ago.
August asks for little and does not
participate.
Whether the wind comes wickedly or with
good intent is of little consequence
to its languid longitude and latitude,
but August lets us be ourselves.
Love is swarming over us
For singing hearts the fairytale
is never over.
-from Rusting in the Rain, to be published in December, 2003. First
Publication 10/30/2003
Like it or not, we live in different times from those when you and I went
from house to house on Halloween ringing doorbells. There are more traffic
problems now and no neighborhood anywhere is a totally safe neighborhood.
That's just the way it is. Be safe not sorry for your children's sake and
for your own peace of mind.
One more thing, don't forget the Golden Rule for All Saints Eve; remind
the kids not to eat unwrapped candy and if possible bring the treats home
so the whole family can look them over and share them.
RM 10/28/2003 !2:PM PST.
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30
OCTOBER
John Adams o
Charles Atlas o
Winifred Bailey o
Ernest Flatt o
Kinky Friedman o
Dick Gautier o
Ruth Gordon o
Harry Hamlin o
Ruth Hussey o
Claude Lelouch o
Taney Mahmoudi o
Louis Malle o
Diego Armando Maradona o
Amey Palm o
Ezra Pound o
Gavin Rossdale o
Grace Slick o
Henry Winkler
31
OCTOBER
Halloween
Barbara Bel Geddes o
John Candy o
Michael Collins o
Dale Evans o
Lee Grant o
Diedre Hall o
Adam Horovitz o
Chiang Kai-shek o
John Keats o
Michael Landon o
Juliette Low o
Larry Mullen, Jr. o
Dermot Mulroney o
Jane Pauley o
Dan Rather o
David Ogden Stiers o
Vanilla Ice o
Jan Vermeer o
Ken Wahl o
Ethel Waters |
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We
could use a lot more skeleton keys for and a lot less skeletons in our
closets.
Don’t trick your friends into treating you
nice. Inspire good treatment from them.
The ghosts that each of us keep hidden in
our hearts are the ones we fear the most.
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A JACK-O'LANTERN OF ONE'S OWN
An October Memory for Wayne Green |
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It wasn't the
hills or sledding there.
or chasing the girls down ice-clean streets -
stealing their mittens and paperbagged lunches
and sharing them with each other.
Not even the snowballs aimed at strangers,
then running 'round corners to staked safe place.
Part of it maybe, not all. What it was mostly
was not knowing what it was. Not even thinking
about it till now.
Some other yesterday back in the distance,
a long-ago twilight, a long time ago. Six
of us boys lined up and boasting, seeing just
which one could piss furthest, longest,
running the risk of bursting our kidneys
till enough was stored up
to write names in the snow.
Having a short name, I won some and lost
some, I carried the day. I stumbled, I fell.
Now is not so much different from
long time ago.
Many's the snowman - neighborhood effort.
you bring the carrot, I'll bring the coal. Hard
Guardian Angel not melting till now.
Spare tires that hung from limbs over water.
A dive when the creek had more water
than mud., A place to go off to where every
injustice, real or imagined, could be
ridden out.
Books, like jeans, were tossed in a corner,
left there dirty, dog-eared to grow.
Homework was building a hut in the cellar
to hide in and ride out fantasy, fiction, mind
fodder and stuffing. Planning a weekend
never a life, breaking the skin on my dick
in the darkness alone and forsaken, bleeding
to death. Hearing those footsteps above in
the kitchen, knowing that SHE must have
heard me cry out.
It wasn't the floorboards, only the foreskin
under the kitchen cracking from friction.
One-legged jumpers hopping chalked boxes
on cleaned-up sidewalks between heavy snows.
The taw a marble, a half-eaten jaw-breaker,
a rock from a pocket that fell through a hole.
Winter game, summer game, names no longer
known. Red Rover, Red Rover, won't you
come over . . .
was that Kick-the-can or Sheep-in-my pen?
Whatever, whatever, It comes back whenever
I think of myself as a fully-grown man.
The lines 'round my forehead and 'round
my eye corners bunch up like creased
leather on the back of the backseat of old
Buick Sedans.
Me growing older, imagine the irony.
I couldn't wait, thought it might never happen.
Was sure I'd be cut down before the next season,
let alone grow up, grow older, grow old. A
fatalist then always seeing the dark side. Why,
looking back, is there now only light?
A child builds life around birthdays and
Holidays, what other calendar works for
the young?
Money enough every October
for only one fat golden pumpkin. An eye
for my brother to hollow, the other for me
to carve. The mouth one more problem,
always, an argument.
Shouldn't Jacks smile?/ No Jack ought to frown.
When did a smile in front of a candle bully
a trick into a treat? No matter how careful
the paring and carving, always one tooth
usually upper, snapped onto the table
dropped into a lap, bounced on the floor
and got trod underfoot.
Oh brother, my brother beginning to bawl
over spoiled jack-o'-lantern,
just part of the plan.
My baby brother cried quicker, easier
than movie star ladies in mush matinees.
Tears would well up at the smell of a
quarter. Hush money, of course, to quiet
the kid. It always did. Then off to the grocery
for jellybeans, Jujubes. Poor old Jack left on
the table. Mama would always redo his
bridgework, an always-inevitable smile,
not a frown. Still what is a holiday without
family ritual. Thanksgiving, Halloween -
each has its rules. And, anyway, Mama
was some kind of sculptor. God may
have made Adam but every year Mama
tooled up and turned out a remake of Jack.
Rooms aren't important to kids growing up
as long as there are nails and boards to build
boxes.
A box of your own is a must. It gives the head
running room the heart its own hollow,
the body a place to bed down and bed.
It well might be worth forgoing the ransom
for pumpkins messed up, carved crooked
on purpose
if every kid's Bill of Rights included a jackknife,
a taw of importance and his own scowling Jack.
- from "Folio No. 56", fall 1986 |
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