Category Archives: Writing

Night Walker

Earlier this year, in one of my stream-of-consciousness blathers, I mentioned the idea of mounting a television to a treadmill, enabling me to watch an odd mix of television series and made-for-Netflix movies while getting some exercise. If I did … Continue reading

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I Can’t Write this Morning

I can’t write this morning.  Writing suddenly seems a luxury, a shameful waste in the face of real necessity. My mood will change, I’m sure. I am fortunate, in that it always does. But maybe it shouldn’t. Maybe the escape … Continue reading

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When Life and Death Were Simple

In my mind, I picture an ancient cave-dweller, a man in his early twenties. During the time he lived, the average lifespan of humans was only twenty-six. The rare thirty-year-old or rarer forty-year-old were considered extraordinary. And they were. They … Continue reading

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Struggling

I keep coming back to Struggles, the imaginary town in Arkansas that is grappling with its history of poor management, populations flight, and an uncertain future. I say I keep coming back to the town, but I haven’t been writing … Continue reading

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Telenovela

It finally became too much. Not too much to bear, just too much to tolerate. Too much to process. Too much boastful self-absorption to willingly witness. And, so, you washed your hands of it. You rinsed off the sticky goo … Continue reading

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Rumi

I spent an entirely unsatisfactory fifteen minutes earlier this morning attempting to learn more about the Persian poet, Rumi. The time was unsatisfactory because, for one reason, I was unable to wade through the various Persian and Arabic and other … Continue reading

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Farmers’ Rebellion

Kenneth “Hurricane” Whackman was confirmed as Secretary of Weather only three weeks after Charlene Floore was sworn in as the fifty-eighth president of the United States. Two days later, Tyson “Popeye” Monsanto was confirmed as Secretary of Agribusiness, the position … Continue reading

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Elvin’s Exorcism

I’ll try something different today. Instead of attempting without success to craft a wannabe witty stream-of-consciousness screed, I’ll explain myself. My name is Elvin and I live inside a body that is not my own. I use it because it … Continue reading

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Lacking Credentials

Poetry fills an aching need within the poet to express emotions that cannot be expressed otherwise. And poetry enables poets and their audiences, whether readers or listeners, to establish intimate emotional bonds. Sometimes—more often than not, it seems—the words of … Continue reading

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Talking to Myself

I have started, and in a few cases finished, several new posts over the last several days that have yet to be published. Even the “finished” posts, though, are incomplete. There is something about the words I have written or … Continue reading

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Safe Places

Safe places are the stuff of folklore. They exist in ever smaller numbers today, numbers smaller than zero and with even less substance. Safety, always a figment of the imagination, has vaporized into an evanescent fantasy so vague and ghostly … Continue reading

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Fiction and Reality, One and the Same

There was a time, not so long ago, that I found it easy to write about fictional dystopian horrors, experiences unlike anything I ever experienced. My imagination allowed me to picture those ghastly nightmares as a dispassionate observer, watching through … Continue reading

Posted in Compassion, Covid-19, Empathy, Writing | 2 Comments

Struggles (AR) in the Times of Pestilence

The fictional town of Stuggles, Arkansas morphed from a small town coping with abandonment by its principal employer, a manufacturing plant, into a community on life support, thanks to a virus for which no immunity nor any treatment exists.  The … Continue reading

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Love is the Richest Emotion

I love you. You know who you are. I could listen to your voice for hours if you’d let me. And I suppose you would. But what reason could I give for wanting to hear it? What excuse could I … Continue reading

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Distortion

Consider how radically different your life would have been if you had been adopted in 1962 by a Chinese peasant couple who traveled to the United States from their rural home outside the tiny village of Zhongxin in Guizhou Province, … Continue reading

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Structured Thinking with a Bit of Flex

A tiny bit more structured introspective assessment, please. Nothing imbued with gravitas, though; let’s keep it light and airy, to the extent introspection makes that possible. Keep it flexible so it can bend the way my mind bends. Mind-bending. Does … Continue reading

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The Cost

Words left unspoken Thoughts never shared Love never given Hearts never bared Hurt not softly soothed Life like a cell Hate freely given Tears never fell Eyes lacking for sight Regret not felt Emptiness so cold Knees never knelt Heartaches … Continue reading

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Shrapnel

The confetti from the explosion filled his chest. There was still room for his lungs and his heart and his liver and so forth, but the formerly roomy spaces were clogged with shrapnel. The wounds in his flesh healed over … Continue reading

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It’s Over

You wanted to tell her how much she meant to you, but you waited too late. You waited until she didn’t mean as much. You waited until her faults flooded your brain and drowned your good intentions. You put off … Continue reading

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The Bad Poet

The bad poet mangles words and scorches meanings, bludgeoning beauty until it resembles a bloated corpse left in the desert sun for an entire season. The bad poet ruins ideas, polluting them with bias as thick as an atmosphere of … Continue reading

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Doing Alone

When friends’ shoulders aren’t there for the crying, when love is a wall made of stone, when life seems a prelude to dying, when you’re lonely and weeping alone. That’s when you create your own salvation, you craft it from … Continue reading

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Making Music

If I could start recording my voice at any given moment simply by pressing a single, easily accessible button, I might have recorded dozens, if not hundreds, of songs by now. Only the lyrics, of course, with no musical accompaniment … Continue reading

Posted in Music, Poetry, Writing | 2 Comments

Hush

I am a dormant volcano. A raging inferno whose fuel, spent in spectacular displays of fire and molten rock, has disappeared into the center of the Earth. I may be, in fact, an extinct volcano, one with no recorded eruption in … Continue reading

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Someone Else Thinks Inside My Head

Several of his friends regularly commented about Skyler’s writing, frequently expressing amazement at how vividly his words painted his characters’ thoughts and physical surroundings. “It’s as if you were there, behind his eyes, recording every detail,” Ophira O’Malley said to … Continue reading

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Elbow

Elbow McMaster stood facing the front door, poised to spring upon the woman the moment she entered. His eyes, fixed on the peephole well above his eye level, noticed a momentary interruption in the light on the tiny circular glass … Continue reading

Posted in Fiction, Writing | 4 Comments