Sept 2020 Recap
Time flies when you are having a good time, but it also flies in a time of turmoil. Recently a friend wondered where the summer went, he couldn’t really recall spring either. He was one of the lucky ones those job allowed for work from home so he isn’t fully idle during the lockdown as it becomes less a lockdown & more a social distance challenge.
I told him that as one gets older time seems to move quicker plus in a time of crisis it moves even faster. One of things I learned when I was involved in palliative care in the early days of HIV is that one loses awareness of the ‘stress’ – I think the same thing is true of the covid19 crisis. The stress becomes normalized but the threat hasn’t gone away. With both the fluctuations of numbers, restrictions & the civil war news from the USA one loses track of the passage of time. Thus time moves faster.
At the start of the lockdown I joking told a couple of friends ‘see you in September’ – they thought I was being overly pessimistic, little did we realize then that I should been saying ‘see you in September 2021.’ We have learned more about covid & its transmission since the first of the year but the threat still exists.
September has been a month of living in this new reality. Masks are fashion accessories. Social distancing is an acceptable excuse for avoid people you don’t want to see anyway 🙂 Masks as seen as infringements of personal rights by the same people who berated gay men for not wearing condoms. I use both but masks are much easier to get on & off 🙂
Blogging less has been productive as I have been writing more. October will see some of that new work with a fresh set of spooky poems to show up on Fridays. I’m still working through the annotated Distant Music. One of the books I read in September was Allen Ginsburg’s look back at Howl in which he discusses inspirations, explains his intent, names & context – which is pretty much what I’ve doing with Distant Music.
Time for stats 🙂 Over the month my TOpoet.ca following blog grew to 385! The WP map show my hits have come from 31 countries around the world. That India still tops the list is interest but Portugal & China are now in the top 10. Venezuela! America Samoa!
My Tumblr is at 292 – it would be higher but I block buxom babes & guys who slam drugs, not poetry. Twitter is at 226 followers it would be higher but I block buxom babes, editorial services & mavens eager to show me how to make big bucks on the internet. Picture Perfect: 37 sections, about 58,000 words posted so far with 130,000 approx to be edited then posted.
Fog Tarantella
<>
for too many years
I was in a tree top
shouting out for love
I didn’t care where it came from
the louder I shouted the less I heard
the higher I climbed
the further I got away from it
yet I didn’t think of climbing down
I wanted the love that was in the air
not the common stuff of the earth
not knowing then
that was where love grew from
<>
one morning during a snow storm
the first after a long hot autumn
of yelling myself hoarse
give me love I want love
blood flecks dappling the leaves
the snow at first a few darting specks
then a steady scrim hush
to cool my eyes
flakes on my fevered tongue
letting the sky satisfy
as best it could
but the sky doesn’t love back
except with echoes
<>
while the snow cloaked me
my own limbs mantled like branches
a peacock
clumsily descended
a bird that at a distance has stunning beauty
but this close it was motley
squawking as it settled by me
our eyes met
his tail opened
the breathtaking fan of feathers
stopped my shouting
I reached out to touch
fell
earth bound by beauty
at the foot of the tree
<>
a mist arose around me
through the winter fog
came men dancing
their arms around wisps of white
the imagined bodies of lovers
caressing the backs
touching the hair
making it as real as they could
kissing empty haze
could I join them
should I
was this all I could expect on earth
or would I be bold enough
to allow one of these dancing men
to dance with me
before I climbed a tree
lost in the fog
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