Status of a situation

Know the problem. Know the device.
How far can the device highlight your problem?

we do not directly know of the problem. A tool tells us that something is not right.
when the tool stops talking, how to guess the happening?

Problem hiding a problem.

Writing and Spirituality

If the writers work is already present and waiting to be found, then for those looking for God, is he an island for the floating? All paras need to be good for an article to work. If the beginning eludes, then Writing in Reverse as jill dearman suggests might work. If that doesnt, snuggle into the paras and get in somehow. There must be a group of islands. some small. some big.

In a childs hands

horseshoe stakes become cymbals
bean bags begin bean wars
fishing rods become swords
and hoola hoops can rain as drops

Sixty years later

Dee does not care about things she hasnt worked for. There was a rumor that ism would not be tolerated. Her friend Umbre's life is hard to imagine without the daily routine of chants. She cannot recall the hymns she sang every morning. Her book is warped with alphabets she cannot recognise.


After listening to the Mongolian throat singing, I can appreciate the mockingbird emanating throaty buzzes.

Looking down from the Light house , SanDiego seemed like a Greek polis with occupied rolling land.

Glovebox has the answer

A banana cracked open at an edge in the center. Ill fitting pants. The crack didnt reveal anything unexpected. For the most part since it is homogenous, except for the small dots inside. Imperceptible. The threads are louder. Even with its nose cone, it is hard to eat it fast with its filling taste in fewer bites.

Long time ago, a good friend urged me to go through the car manual. With no problems, it is hard to find your way through a manual for a solution that you only need later. service checkup revealed that a HEPA filter had to be changed. If outsourced, it would cost lot. Now is the time to look at the manual. For the current problem, the manual suggests dealer as the answer. Some self help videos and some confusion resulted in a good part (recently replaced) - air filter being replaced. Do-it-yourselfs make you believe in the impossible. A look at the glovebox, it aint gonna give. Other models flap in. It is supposed to be easy. Push in from the sides and it is expected to fall down vertically, revealing the cabin filter. With so much insistence of its possibility, it had to be true. The car now has a clean cabin filter. A look at the contents of the old filter - makes one think that its job is to chop cut trees into manageable size before trashing. Only these twigs and leaves are dehydrated. Inmates in car should smell the wilderness.

If entry into your car is not push button, you have a curfew coming up. If battery failure can prevent start up, how dont the extensive tests reveal its status? A shutdown which resets your radio, clock and thereby forces you to go the manual. A code could lie in a piece of paper in a tiny ziploc, with its knowledge that someday that those numbers would be punched in to unlock a radio while you are in ignorance until that moment. Suddenly the dashboard has secret letters which will get you back to correct time. If I am suprised that I will use some of the buttons to punch in numbers, I am even more to hold one long enough to beep.

The Art of Maintenance has just begun. The car decides to unfold itself through the crack of the hood and the glovebox. More mysteries ahead.

Feigning Immortality

The radio sends smooth waves
while the listener drifts to sleep
may be one more song
and then I can pull the plug

While the brain drifts to sleep
The hand that can pull the plug
waits for a discordant song

What kids see

At a grocery store, I set the milk gallons on the ground, waiting for the conveyor belt to roll forward and bring up space from the bottom. A kid of four or so, lifts the gallon saying thats easy. I admired his strength. He then found a toy baseball and threw it. It landed on the belt. He had many questions for the cashier. when the belt was free, he was going to help me lift the gallons on to the belt. As he moved ahead, he asked me to check if there was another baseball from where he had picked the previous one. His eyes couldnt reach it, but the mischievous must feel the presence of a green lit button on everything.

Carrying the tree

Right after a workout
the world looks new
A tree overlooking the road
now framed by jacaranda trees
with flowers and no leaves

On my way to work
I pick the
clumps of flowers - unwilted
green stems like lines
to keep the color with me
throughout the day

Avian Gardener

A lantana surrounds
a plant with leaves
triangular
like a betel leaf

Above by the
side is a
bird house
with different seeds

farmer of the spilt

Display

A baby squirrel
beat its tail
as long as itself
over its back
a threat display

A mockingbird
lands onto the grass
picking a grain or worm
in the wet
A cat still young
to know its tail as its own
was all stealth
with hidden movement
in its hind legs
The bird then hung
around for a while
on an arch
a lamp
a rooftop

Pregnant

still early
massage said the nurses
lying on the table
I felt cuts into
hard calves
pumice over dead skin

Shadow

Have you seen
a shadow run
or even walk
on the ground

In the days

when playing with
dirt was fun
You hide a small stick
in a clump of sand and
shape it like a small
long bank.
Your friend marks the
place where the stick
might be with joined
hands on the ground
If you find the
stick in the unmarked
area you win

A bird is a color

Dark Goldenrod with black spots
Two birds with opposite pigments
small Owls
I regard them,
they fling a
one and half insect
I let the memorabilia crawl

I regard a baby
her shriek talk
her palm tight softness
she shies her head around

Night's voice

Does the night sing
like a bird awake
or stars twinkle loud
do the crickets lend
their chatter or is
it their drone, snore?

In this monophony,
the bear watchful
of a handful kid
is always silent

Preserving mould

A finsihed form
vs the flutes and
folds of a hanging cloth
Why are the edges and
walls polished
smooth, perfect
parallel, perpendicular

A prickly pear
next to a
grass bush

Memory

is a mischance
of steps traced back
to spot the hawk like
bird at the edge
of a tangle of walls
from the l b h sides

All the times you
stop by
the flower,
the ants,
for the time they deserve
they stay on
their stalks,
their mounds
forever.

Sleep

is relieving your
neck
from holding your head

tray table in flight

Chaski

Each journey
A relay with your
twins or triplets
till you meet the next
who can see what
you are about to see
and close to what
he is about to see


Chaski from pg 19, Forest primeval to park Avenue, The Routes of Man, Ted Conover

The Good of Culture

Cross Kneed


To alleviate pain
Unfurl
only to cross at shins
Why cross?
The good unknown to us
like an appendix
If time is the teacher
why lament on generation

With time

And out upon that naked lift of pasture
Where lay her stillborn child, she came, and there
Was caught in the wash and welter of two waves
Of life.
Ann Garner,James Agee
An interesting interview of Andrew Hudgins, the editor of Agee's selected poems.

Imagine all the things we lost,
safe in the waves somewhere
far away from us.
These dont diminish
as they recede.

Those who are next to it
are married to the sea
But how is the sea a refuge
for those who are not

Ironic that some time ago when I saw a foreign pop song where a guy throws letters into the oceans, it was unbearable to see.

Snow

In the Realms of the Unreal, a small girl in pink is watching the snow fall, through a window. Her arms are close to her body but her reflection in the glass shows them slightly away. May be its right to alter the reflection. May be thats how her mind feels, alittle free, watching the snow fall. As the narrator feels that he could watch it all night, I wonder if I can watch the sunny afternoon all along.
A group of people sit on a bench. they are tols that they are in a place for skiing. The snow patch is thin, then after all their motive to be there might be questioned. There is a patch of connecting ice on a tree. Then it starts snowing. In some place the snow falls definitely in big blobs.
May be the people will be stranded in th house for long.
A big bird on the road is feeding on something. A small bird by its ear is extracting something useful. A man and his son watch this in a blanket. Once the bird is done eating, it contracts itself closer to earth and expands itself longitudinally, ready to follow the movement of the watchers. I close my eyes and stay calm.
Last evening was the beginning of heat.

Blood shed

In abundance things look different.
A cut covered in bandaid is
different from a bottle of blood.
Through the plastic like grape juice.
cauldron of all types
jerry cans of it
all transparent, not just to contain
but to seethe, to pour, roll, waste
lie mute but still bubble as screams

Weeds

In the office parking lot
in enclosed curbs lay
some morning glory bushes
the one with the flowers
lay the farthest
looking like mini
Wilson weed.

Afar a medium sized
palm tree
when I could see its
whole length
its like I found a
place to
sit under

urged by
Pausing from Haiku mind, Patricia Donegan

Turn over

This morning I woke up to moonlight
from the window
where I pulled the blinds to make way
for the next days sun.
Last full moon morning we were
up at Piestewa peak watching the
biggest moon west

The wrinkles on my shirt are gyri
the depression are the sulci

With batter I can make them
lie at an angle and then meld

**************

If each side of our brain had symmetrical functions, then one side injury would make the other side emotional? Internal phantom limb or would it go crazy with the unhealthy signals?

*****************

Each hemisphere moves the opposite side of the body. Why should it be so?

*********************

How do radioactive isotopes used in Positron Emission Tomography cross the blood- brain barrier?



Brain, The complete Mind - Michael S Sweeney

Adult by choice

The sea animal that can stay juvenile
(ask the lady at the phoenix zoo)
Is it scared of growing up
what if it could become an adult
and then reverse molt like a millipede
if it doesnt like

Periodomorphosis in 'Millipede Summers, Silurian Nights' by Sue Hubbell

Norman Maclean

What would a poetical soul be like (forever and at this moment)?

Wordsworth

Spots of time

To be made

the model of the poet for whom all of reality can enter the poem - Michael Davidson

To be made

poetry that attempts to become responsible for all a poet knows about himself and his world - Clayton Eshelman

Tool use

The first I heard of it
by an animal is a story
in which a thirsty crow
makes the water level
in a pot rise by
dropping gravel into it.

One optimistic crow
that will always
find the half filled
glass full

As I watch a congo
chimpanzee pound a bee hive
I wonder how it can hold the
stick in its sole
wrapping around it like that
leg of its were a third hand
free to do the holding while
its arms support its weight
on the tree

like our hands free to hold
the cellphone while
still walking