Children's book

My roommate and I are starting a new project. I’m writing the narrative of a children’s book, and he’s doing the illustrations. We’re writing a children’s book, called

Grandpa Joe and the Island Hotel.

Jerry and Quentin sat bored by the fire in the living room. There was nothing to do so the two boys sat doing nothing. The two friends sighed, looking glum.
For a moment, they thought.
Just then, Rebecca, Jerry’s mother, walked in looking for her father, Grandpa Joe.

“Have you two seen Grandpa Joe?” Rebecca asked.

“We’re bored,” the boys exclaimed.

“Do you know that you’ve just asked the age old question?” said Rebecca.

“We have?” they asked.

“Yes, of course. . .” said Rebecca, “the question of what is there ever to do.”

Jerry and Quentin sighed.

“We’re on vacation, we’re not supposed to be bored,” they exclaimed.

But Rebecca knew what to do.

“I’ll find Grandpa Joe,” she said.

Just then, Grandma Sue came in looking for her husband, Grandpa Joe, so he
could fix her accordion. Before Grandma Sue could open her mouth, Jerry and

Quentin sighed, and said: “Grandpa’s not here.”

Just then, Rebecca’s brother, Uncle Jimmy, came in looking for Grandpa Joe, and asked: “Has anyone seen Grandpa Joe?”

Again, Jerry and Quentin sighed, and said, “He’s not here.”

Then, in walked Grandpa Joe with a hatchet and armful of wood.
“You all look like you’ve been thinking,” said Grandpa Joe.

“Thinking what?” asked Uncle Jimmy.

Jerry and Quentin sighed, and said, “The age old question…what is there ever to do?”

First Half of "What I've Read!" post

This is not about writing. This is about reading. I can’t tell you how or why I became intrigued in reading, but I did, at lets say age four, and have been ever since.
You don’t read, but get your first books read to you: Dr. Seuss' Cat in the Hat, Green Eggs and Ham, O the Places You’ll Go, One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish. The Velveteen Rabbit by Margery Williams. Love You Forever by Robert Munsch.

Even when entering kindergarten, then first grade, you still get read to, but usually on giant carpet rugs. This time, between kindergarten and fifth grade, I only remember a select few, though to my teachers’ credit, there were dozens. I remember Where the Wild Things Are; Titanic; Freak the Mighty; BFG; Swan Lake.
Then fourth grade came, or before fourth grade. At the local library, I joined the book club, and did so for many summers to come. I read Beverly Cleary, Roald Dahl, Judy Blume’s Are You There God, It’s Me Margaret? series. The R.L. Stine Goosebump's series, Mathilda, James and the Giant Peach, Old Yeller, Where the Red Fern Grows, The Yearling, The Bridge to Terabithia, Hatchet, The Secret Garden, The Phantom Tollbooth, Island of the Blue Dolphins, A Wrinkle in Time, Number the Stars, Maniac McGee. Ad infinitum. There is an entire world of good literature out there for fifth, sixth, and seventh graders.
Unfortunately, seventh and eighth grade was a different time for me, which we Americans call puberty. Although in honors English by then, I simply didn’t have time to read. I played sports. When I did read, it was text books. Maybe this time in my life was so traumatizing that retrospectively looking back, I remember nothing, so as to save myself from embarrassment. Maybe Sounder and Mr. Popper’s Penguins, but that’s all I got.
High School was the big shift. Kind of like the gear shift. The tactile shift.
More honors English and more books. Everyman, and all Charles Dickens. A lot of Shakespeare. Things Fall Apart. Jane Eyre.
Brontë's Wuthering Heights.
Buck's The Good Earth. The House On Mango Street. The Red Badge of Courage. The Great Gatsby. A Farewell to Arms.
For Whom the Bell Tolls. The Sun Also Rises. The Iliad. The Odyssey.Death of a Salesman. The Crucible.
Gone With the Wind. The Things They Carried.1984.
In four years you can read a lot of books when you are forced to. And I was forced to. However, by my junior year, I lost interest. No more honors English. Now regular English. Different people in these classes. More apathy, and I loved it.
But the big shift came in eleventh grade. I took a poetry class, for some reason, and have since “stuck with it.” Well, it’s an on again, off again, relationship.
I started buying books, and buying books for people. For girlfriends, for teachers. I was shameless. See a book, buy a book. I can’t say what happened, but when reading and writing crossed, they stayed together like two good friends. I started slowly with Hemingway. Read all Hemingway. . . . . . . . . .



O.K, second half to be announced at a later date.

Art Festival


Sparks ignite
from a man with a long metal mask
welding two pieces of steel.
Two women, possibly friends,
illustrate on a concrete wall.
Other people glance
with eyes that lean
over cups almost spilling with beer.

Bands play. Different clouds of smoke
float.
I drink from a paper cup of lemonade.
A yellow rind floats on top of ice cubes,
while lemon seeds collide with one another.

Behind still glass
are three white rooms
where profssional paintings hang.
This is an art gallery
in the center of an art festival.
People, men and women, walk the rooms.
They disappear, then reappear,
disappear, then reappear
within these quiet rooms.

I catch a women's eye on the street
or we glance
then glance again
over cups.
Something happens, but nothing happens,
as I disappear into the white rooms.

Valleys with Hills of Sawdust

October comes,
Stripping the land of color—
Green apples fall ripe from trees.
October comes
Stripping trees bare.
The grounds are air-raided, dug up,
Made ready for winter.
Dry brown shrubs have died,
And are ready to be dug up.

Today is darker, overcast.
The air is chilled.
We’re at the dumping ground
Picking up damp
clods of hay
Old trees
wooden rods
Off of the trailer.

All to be shredded.

Piles of wooden chips surround us,
Hills of sawdust,
Crowding up next to the myriad of workers
Walking the grounds.
Motion. We all continue to move
among these valleys. . .

On the horizon, a storm is coming.

A post Dedicated to ee cummings and Suburbs

For a brief moment,
I looked for a television camera
Filming this scene:
father drives in driveway
black asphalt new-black
two healthy children
y o u n g boyandgirl,
in swimming suits,
yelling: “D A A A A D.”

But there wasn’t one.
This was real life,
And I found myself
With a handful of sticks, mulch, and small leaves,
Of varying greens and blacks,
In the palm of my hand.

Then, the color yellow,
and the Egyptian pyramids came to mind,
but only for a brief moment.
Kids crossing the street with a wagon
brought me back to reality
and I found myself
with a handful of sticks, mulch, and leaves,
of varying greens and blacks,
in the palm of my hand.

This is my life.
Picking up
From where I left it off:
a suburb in the suburbs
Within the bright yellow of an afternoon.

I've thought about school. I've thought about writing, and writing in different forms. Writing letters--I've even wrote two, but alas, they've gone unsent. Poems, plays, short stories.

I've thought about reading. Reading Eliot, Stevens, Dante, Roethke, Frost, Yeats, and Whitman. And actually I've read most of who I wanted to read, but I haven't written what I wanted to write. I think the problem is that I can't figure out what to write about, how to write, or in what way to write.

On a side note, I probably like your favorite band. There's a reason what they are your favorite, and I can probably see somewhat, however momentarily, through the same lens as yourself. I call this 'coming to where your from.'

I've been studying, and reading 'The Waste Land' for this blog, but I'm a ways away from coming to any conclusion. In the meantime, as said by Spacehog, I'll write down two poems I just wrote...

A Movie Scene

When the music-of-life stops,
like in slow motion,
and she jumps around noiselessly,
exuberantly, happily,
she receives shivers.
Continues to dance a strange dance.
She is not dancing sexual,
nor any other way--though her arm-hairs stand up.
She is having individual moments
and individual moods,
and she receives each as if a gift.

It is like she is at a funeral service
for someone she loved a long time ago.

She is inspired, and really doesn't dance,
but walks on the sidewalk somewhere, I can't tell.



Death is a Misplaced Object

On the promenade
behind the funeral home
among two geese picking themselves
I recollect: "I have a lot to learn."

My Grandfather John has died.
My father, in a tailored suit,
carries himself differently.
Announces me as: "My son. . . "

By the promenade
the stream searches, and finds,
a green pond filled with lily pads.
Sun sits on leaves.

By a stream, I think of death.
I think of death by water
finding other waters,
or of death just as an individual stream appearing by a road.
Like death,
today seems the first day before the next season,
or like a watershed in the middle of a far away field.