#uncoffeed...

"Be careful and lazy!" my friend advised. I laughed, because he and I both have a lot going on, always, sometimes collaboratively. Yesterday, the doctor asked me about pain in my broken ankle. I told him, honestly, that there hadn't been much, and in fact more in the last few days than the whole 5 weeks since I'd been injured. "Did you do anything differently these past few days?"  I thought. "I forgot to take ibuprofen." This is true. Throughout my sentence of crutches, I started taking less OTC pain medication to see exactly how much I hurt. I guess that level of pain felt normal, so I forgot to do anything about it.  I never did tell anyone about the pain in my left elbow.  The ankle didn't hurt much; the elbow is bearable. I can still do my work, though I have to do it without twisting or flexing. I have to remember not to twist, not to flex. Losing personal freedom is what hurts. I couldn't just get up and go get what I'd forgotte

  I dropped some random truths over the past week which random people were grateful to hear. 1. Poet & poetry editor Jeffrey Levine taught us that your poem is an entity, and it has a name - not a title. What's it's name? It wants something - what does it want? A title is something  you assign to a thing for your own convenience - this is me talking, not Jeffrey. We assign titles, we name things, to assert control over them. To conquer fear of them. But what name does your poem call itself? What does it want? You start writing because you have a thing about yourself you want to convey to the world. But if you listen to your poem - like listening to a toddler who doesn't have full command of spoken language - it has its own thing to say. And the fact that it's telling YOU shows you something about yourself. What's it showing you? Anything a toddler shows you is the most precious thing in the world. The child waits for you to respond, and assigns value to his own

No, really. My exceptional book club is discussing " The Soap Opera Effect ." In case you don't want to read the article (which I didn't but I did read it) it's a setting in Smart TVs which inserts AI-generated frames to smooth out motion in fast-moving scenes. Motion-smoothing was invented because some people found action unnerving when it didn't match expectations. This is why we care about prosody , right? Right. Tina Ross taught me the word, but Bill Goodell has been teaching me to be mindful of prosody in songwriting without using the word (like making horse sounds , for example.) We are delighted when the feel of the music matches the sentiment of the lyrics. We like surprises, but we insist on being able to understand (or believe we do) how the author arrived at that decision in the plot. We love our feelings validated, and we especially love our own Aha! moment. This is how songs (movies, books, art) feel familiar to us and create comfort. Proso

I was expecting someone. "Yeah, he doesn't just walk in like you do." I went for the door to let in Cosmo, who handed over my leather portfolio. There's a digital portfolio on my website that most people see first, but tangibility - tactile input -  is still important to me. And the smell...paper and leather. Some clients also want the old-school experience. "Hey, Libby..." Cosmo was already looking at Phil; surely they'd met. I held out the portfolio until Phil acquiesced and put down the mandolin. "You've met Phil, yeah?" Both men nodded. "He paints. Did you know he paints?" Phil winced as he flipped open the brass snap. "It's been known to happen. This is interesting stuff here. Different. Hey, Cosmo." "Hey, Phil! I think you went to Cal Poly for architecture?" Cosmo hovered near the door. Phil leaned still against the loveseat, not looking up, flipping pages. "Got a BArch. I guess you would know ea

Right. Phil wants to go over some things. 86 the shower and decompression time. I slumped onto a corner of the big wooden coffee table, poking at the rug with my sneaker, octopus on my mind. Phil had his mando out already, leaning against one arm of the love seat, plinking. "Libby, I get the feeling you're not a person who likes surprises." That made me look up.  "Not bad, Phil." He is the perfect accompanist, after all. Plink, plunk - he was accompanying himself. I turned my attention back to the carpet...or the thing under it. "I don't figure Ian's given you any logistics." Phil laughed wryly. "So you got any questions, you can ask me." "Dude, I haven't had time to formulate questions yet." Hell with it -- Ian did say I should show Phil. I stood up. "Here. Lemme show you what I did." I pushed the coffee table up against the love seat, dragging the rug along with it. Phil's attention latched onto a tentac

He was staring through my window in his dingy wife-beater undershirt, sullen, short hair comically slanting backward. I hadn’t seen Dwight Flood land in my flowerbed, but my train of thought easily followed the cursing, the name of my cat, the cat leaping through the small door flap in the entryway and skidding across the tiles.  The property manager’s face loomed, a lone impatiens blossom dangling on one side of his head. As if he could feel me looking at it, he brushed the flower aside with the hairy back of one hand. His eyes looked about to leave his head. I thought it best to go ahead outside and address the issue. “Want some coffee?”  Dwight Flood made a quarter turn to glare in my direction. He was seething. I continued the friendly patter.  “Cement’s slippery when it’s wet. Thank God for the flower bed, huh?” I ventured a friendly smile, which was shot down by piercing eye-arrows. It was no use. Dwight Flood and my cat have held a mutual blood-wish since they met three years ag

 by d ebora Ewing buy the book: Academia Nuts by William Bland William Bland is a polymath. Igneus Press published Bland's poetry chapbook Academia Nuts in 2016. Here's some backstory: "in 1998 he began a series of 24 piano sonatas each in a different key, which was completed in 2014. In 2002, a visit from a former student, Alexander Seward, inspired him to begin writing a series of poems to accompany the writing of the sonatas. From 2002-2007 approximately five hundred eighty poems were written under the comprehensive title "Poems Accompanying Sonatas." Several series of poems developed within the larger structure, including the series entitled "Academia Nuts", written cautionarily for Alexander as he entered his university studies." Academia Nuts is perfectly curated. I sense a love of academia running like rails alongside a warning from a tired generation. Ardor is as much a character in the narrative as are clowns, connoisseurs, and h

I was looking for a poet,  Charles John Quarto . Any emails sent through his web page, though, are answered by Steve Gillette , Charles John’s writing partner of many years. SG told me how to get in touch with the poet, and told me about his own website: About the Song . I found so much good there that a year later, when I saw SG’s picture on a wall at The Birchmere , I wrote to him again and said, "Looky what I found." We had things to talk about. We’re both fans of Carl Jung, for starters, if fan is the right word. As conversation unfolded, I gave SG a breakdown of why I think Wichita Lineman is a love song about processing grief. He directed me to a TedTalk by Daniel Sherrill which explored why, perhaps, people don’t connect emotionally with the concept of climate change. We thought a love song to climate change would be a good idea. I connected with Tina Ross near the beginning of 2020, the year we’re still in (by my count it is now 2020.2.)  We Belong to the DanF

Cosmo insisted on helping me with my luggage, but I took my bag from him at Ian's gate. My world was precarious already and I just didn't want unnecessary kindness tipping me off my flat edge. That creaky wooden door without a peephole loomed large at the end of a 14-foot long cracked cement walkway. For the first time, I was relatively certain someone was inside. I didn't know what to do - knock? Should I be like Phil and just walk in?  How long have I been standing here?  The door opened, and a rumpled pile of sweatpants, flannel, and concert t-shirt stood in my path. Ian's hair was poofed and aslant, but he seemed lucid and happy, like he'd been in the process of just waking up for days. He held the door open for me.  "Thanks for coming," he said, reaching for the handle of my suitcase. Thanks for coming. I didn't know what to do with this. I was still standing on the patio. Ian shuffled forward and took charge of the handle. "I've got cof

I was just reading a blog post in which I weighed past decisions against where I am now . I tell you there's been a lot of angry going on around here.  At the moment of this writing, I have been paid for a piece of art, I am expecting payment on another that's been sold at a local exhibit; I have been paid for two freelance editing jobs; I have been paid for books sold - mycelium. xPoetry - both through Amazon KDP and from a neat little pop-up in Texarkana (I don't say whether it's Arkansas or Texas because honestly I don't know.) I'm all over the place and raking in pennies. Pennies are good. I'm not supporting myself this way yet, but I am paying bills with ROI. It feels good. Where the anger comes in is this: I never meant to be doing any of this alone.  These days in the woods have been spent deliberately trying to re-collect what was lost, what I was when I was my most me. I had a true and supportive partner once, and it showed: we brewed our own beer

At Ian's Place begins here: Part One Cosmo was pulling up to Arrivals just as I walked out the sliding doors. His car was immaculate as usual – like a commercial staging. Sometimes I wonder if he’s even real. “So, cool. Haven’t see you around in a while. How’ve you been?” Cosmo seemed perky, and kept looking at me while he wove his Lexus through the cars, scooters, donkeys, and chickens leaving LAX. Okay, it only felt like that.  If I‘d taken a car service, though, I could have buried my face in my phone and avoided small talk. Cosmo doesn’t small talk, which made this dialogue extra itchy. “What’s on your mind, Cosmo?” I sighed. “Can’t a guy be happy to see you? Okay.” He snapped his attention to the road. Whatever was on his mind was serious, and possibly awkward. “So I’m having a thing at my place on Saturday. You coming?” “Sure, yeah. What are you thinking?” “Excellent.” Cosmo's hands relaxed their grip on the steering wheel. “I have someone I want you to meet.”

*this is Annabelle, not a dalmatian. My mom used to give us our Christmas presents early because she couldn't wait, and then she'd buy something else to open on the holiday. She and I started a tradition some time ago, when we no longer wanted to exchange gifts, of mailing each other clipped advertisements. This game was called "This is what I'm not getting you for [insert holiday here]." T he best was an inflatable moose head . ...but then when I lived in Cali she mailed me a duck decoy with white spots painted all over it (to match my Dalmatian, she said.) Mom found the duck decoys tucked under the hedge when she bought her house (the one she moved out of without telling anybody.) A t one point she brought them to the house on Cabot street where I lived with Tim. W e lined them up in the yard and played bowling with his pro bowling balls. It was Tim's idea - an act of defiance against the brain tumor that prevented him from bowling, playing guitar, or anyth