'Disappointment'

You Bump Your Speed Dial

again

and my phone rings,

and there's your name

in the caller I.D.

again,



another call

that's not a call

for me,

though I'm hearing

your voice,

and hearing the kids,

hearing your life;



you still can't

hear me,

even though

I'm shouting

again.

-jorge999

Fantasy Written in a Country Churchyard

I had an enjoyable conversation at lunch today with my brother*. Alas, I forgot to mention the one thing that I had really wanted to tell him.

After church this past Sunday, I happened to noticed that the car next to mine had the vanity plate:

I PADDLE.

Curious, I lingered, hoping to get a glimpse of the vehicle's owner. As luck would have it I never did see whose plate it was, but as I waited, my imagination took flight.

In my mind I conjured a vision of the car's owner as a leggy, stern-faced beauty.
And, as my fantasy soared, I decided what I would say to this imagined goddess when she appeared:

"I have been a very naughty boy!" :-)




*who is, after all, one of only a few people who share with me in a sort of 'congenial perversity' :-)

Behavior and Motivation

We can't accurately ascribe one single motive for the antiwar behavior of students.
For some college students in the Viet Nam era, going to Canada or seeking conscientious objector status, resulted from their honest conviction that it was an immoral war.

For others, self-preservation or self-interest may have been the major impetus for the same behavior. Or, for that matter their motives could have been mixed.

Similarly, many young people who decided to GO to Viet Nam --whether enlisted or drafted-- went because they thought it was the patriotic thing to do. While others may have submitted to being drafted not because of the 'rightness' of the war but because it was the line of least resistance -- especially in the early years of the war, when young americans from small-town, and middle america would have been subjected to intense scorn, derision and even threats from some of their townsmen, if they actively opposed the war or refused to go.

Overt behavior does not, in itself, definitively answer the question of a person's motivation ...or of their virtue.

'Do Not Give Me Things Unbroken'

"The heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing"
-Pascal, 'Pensées'


In the Fall of 2002 I read an article about poet Ottone
Riccio. To honor him on the occasion of his eightieth
birthday, Riccio's students compiled a poetry anthology,
entitled, "Do Not Give Me Things Unbroken".
In that anthology, each of the poems by past and present
students, 54 in all, was inspired by a Riccio assignment
to write something based on the book's title phrase.
I decided to take the 'assignment' myself and the result
was the poem below:


'Do Not Give Me Things Unbroken'

Do not give me things unbroken,
bring to me what's scarred and scratched,
All that's bent, and soiled, and torn,
Bring to me the shoes unmatched,

I must have what's frayed and dented,
old and battered, crushed and worn,
Crippled, bleeding, unrepented,
helpless, hapless and forlorn,

All these things I gather to me,
Though they're broken so am I,
I don't know what they mean to me,
My heart loves them, God knows why.

-jorge999

'Another Way' (for BFS)

Our paths may cross some of these days

in search of separate yearnings,

Yours to the strand and crashing waves,

and mine to mountain turning,

who can fathom our desires?

So deep...... beyond discerning,

Each seeks a different paradise

or new, or a returning.

-jorge999