Pumpkin Festival

Every year in Keene, NH they threaten to

discontinue the annual pumpkin festival.

But somehow, every year, it keeps coming back for me.

I'm glad. Sure, it clogs the street. Sure, people from all over come to look

at big, orange, oddly shaped veggies.

But it's beautiful. All those people, and all those pumpkins,

well, they are just beautiful.

Fuck the War

Fuck the war

Fuck oil

and politics

and national borders

and fear.

Fuck the weapons used to fight the war

Fuck the hands that pull the triggers,

the minds that conceive of war,

the hearts broken, the lives shattered

the buildings lost

the crumbling ground

beneith the war.

Fuck the war.

The Real Reason

I imagine him staring out the foggy glass airplane window. I assume he got window seat, he only takes the best (I think this as I consider the ease with which he let me go). He did not come here to work, or to love me..no, those were the words attached to the actions, but they are not the truth. I imagine him reciting Blake to the soft, dim reflection of his weathered face, tired from the emotion of it all. "If the sun and the moon should doubt, they'd immediately go out." i murdered myself eight months later. and in the pane of glass on the airplane window he will always remember what i looked like the first time he saw me. and i wish that he could have said that it was at a bar in Iowa, playing a silky piano. i wish he could say that he immediately recognized what sustained me, not music, or poetry, or my appetite for suffering, but there, under all my drifting world of pain, he could maybe see my desire to see how much longer the black bitter tide could sustain me, how much longer i could live on nothing.

Faces

I love people and their beautiful faces. Here are a few I'm particularly fond of:

This is Jesse. We've been through hell and back. He's my wailing wall.

The last one standing.

Jesse and my heart.

My nephew at the beach. Booth Bay, ME.

Laura. She laughs and cries. I catch her doing both.

Howard and I at the Agricultural Festival in Brattleboro, VT.

He is one of my dearest friends.

Stranger with a great face. Brattleboro, VT

And so it fails again.In Monet's Water Lilies, willows dissolve into flowers dissolve into water, and form becomes a dream in purples and blues
without scent or story. And you know what you're supposed to see. And you know what all that color is meant to be. But maybe someone should have pointed out that the whole picture is very unclear. That life, like water lilies dissolves into flower, into water, in deep blue and black and disappears. Without scent or story.

Where The Light Gets In

Happiness after grief feels like such a betrayal: the hurt not denied.. not pushed away, but gone entirely for that moment you can't help feeling good in, a moment of sudden, irrational joy over nothing of consequence, really, which makes it all somehow seem even worse...
Shouldn't happiness be the result of some grand event, something adequate to counter
that aching, gaping chasm that opened when ?. . . But, no: it's merely this: there goes my little neice, running barefoot, no pants, mouth stained in pink drenched lollipop.











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