I hope those out there celebrating Easter are bathed in light and love. However you honor your days, my greatest joy will be when we can someday be together again.

We must all surely sense there is hope around the corner. This is a time of reflection and renewal. Let the healing begin. One more shot left for me. I look forward to complaining for a few days after that. Whine for Table Two!

On a lighter note, I need a lot of personal repair work done in the merry old land of Oz before I am fit for public re-entry. I need a protective mask that covers head to toe before I feel ready to join the world again. “If I only had the noive…” Buzz buzz here. Buzz buzz there. And a couple of lah-de-dahs.

A big basket of courage cheerfully accepted. Is there a wizard in the house? Bell out of order. Please knock! Aaah-wooooof!

If you were on the internet in April 2019, you may recognize computer scientist Katie Bouman, who went viral after her team captured the world’s first image…
— Read on www.lx.com/social-justice/women-are-writing-themselves-back-into-history-on-wikipedia/34029/

It’s about time.

I’m not complaining. I’m halfway there to Fully Vaccinated for Covid-19. My body is in full-blown, mentally and physically exhausted mode. Not sure why these side effects are hitting me this hard but sharing here just in case this is something you’re feeling or will feel. You are not alone.

Another curious benefit of the shot? I’m on a poetry-buying spree. Time of impulse purchases? Middle of the night. If this is wrong, I don’t want to be right. (Fuzzy Wrath!) Latest buys: Robert Browning, Jean Valentine, Elizabeth Bishop. One love. One Art.

When I asked Bruce Springsteen what to do with his guitar, he said: “Play it!” Ask Elizabeth Bishop what to do with your poetry? “Write it!”

One Art

BY ELIZABETH BISHOP

The art of losing isn’t hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother’s watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster.

—Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident
the art of losing’s not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

Elizabeth Bishop, “One Art” from The Complete Poems 1926-1979. Copyright © 1979, 1983 by Alice Helen Methfessel. Used by permission of Farrar, Straus & Giroux, LLC, http://us.macmillan.com/fsg. All rights reserved.

We are not women writers.
We don’t call men “male writers.”
We are all writers.
Come out of the closet. History needs us.
https://www.jewishbookcouncil.org/pb-daily/the-silent-toilers-are-no-longer-silent

When 2 AM became 3 AM, I asked every computer in the house how its internal clock works. How does it know to zip ahead on this date and that time? This is a personal enigma that could have been avoided had I not dropped out of a introductory computer programming class at NYU after the first impossibly complicated session.

I skipped second and eighth grades. Did you learn this stuff then and forget to share your notes with me?

www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/ruth-bader-ginsburg-s-statue-unveiled-brooklyn-her-birthday-n1260919

Living Ruth.

Happy birthday to the notorious RBG. You moved mountains. You climbed mountains. You persisted.

You are my Brooklyn Girl. I’ll always love you.

Is there a connection between Aleve or Motrin and bad dreams? I take the pills for the pain. Not to cause more.

Sitting at my desk. Something beige batting against the screen on the open window. 
A moth. 
Trying to get in. I don't know why. You are free to fly. 
I wait my turn. 
Vaccines are on the march in March.

Are you strapped for cash, Vinny? Could you use a little exposure? A branding that captures the essence of you for the home cleaning market?
Ladies and gentlemen. For that starry, starry sight in your home, swish the soot away with
DUST FOR LIFE.
Sold at fine art houses and supermarkets everywhere.

A-Z of Billy Collins’ Poetry Broadcast

A – Z: The Billy Collins Poetry Broadcast — Neil Elder Poetry

What a list! Know before you Go! Thanks, Neil.

www.instagram.com/p/CLUJa-mnDol/

When It‘s Safe…

I’m coming for you, Life.

I miss you.

Bright Lights, Big City,

Burgers and Books

---

photo courtesy: Sabrina Ross

Be kind when you read this
today, or years from now.

Melodrama.

I made my first contact with
real life yesterday.
Like a newborn baby,
bursting into the world in wonder
Startled by sights of cars and people
What are these things?

And here is the funny part,

where comedy intersects with tragedy.

Perfect timing to come out of the woods.
I dashed like a woman on fire to the back of the store, nearly closing time, aisles empty of people. Afraid to see anyone I knew in my half-grey hairs and cracked, witches’ fingers.
Prescription ready. Pay. Run. Go.

Leaving the way I came in, I passed the greeting cards, stacked, overflowing, untouched. Except one section.
There were no sympathy cards.
Not one. Not one.
Emptied, like the streets and stores and spirit.
Sold, all sold. Like essentials.
Sympathy is everywhere. Everyone is dying.

But another essential appeared.
Must not dwell on drama or I will drop to my knees,
surrounded by mourning and misery.
(Survivor reality show casting? Call me.)
Is it a mirage?
Comic relief.
Toilet Paper!
Toilet paper from behind the front counter.
I asked for more than one package but the cheerful clerk said,
Sorry, one package per customer.

Insert the depressing organ sound. You are not a winner.
Life is a sitcom and the credits are about to roll.

I took what I could get.
Thoughts and prayers.
TP and Sympathy.

Be kind when you read this.
Be kind to the strangers who
suffer far more than you will ever know.
Some need toilet paper.
Some need sympathy.

From March 30th, 2009. Eleven years ago. Another lifetime away.

Where I’m Coming From:

I can’t say exactly what made me click on John Lundberg’s blog on today’s HUFFINGTON POST. Maybe it was an e-mail alert that Lundberg had uploaded a new blog. Maybe I was reading the Sunday New York Times Arts and Leisure section and something caught my eye about new movies and word of the upcoming release of HOWL, a movie starring James Franco as a young Allen Ginsberg and the obscenity trial brought in the U.S. after the poem’s publication.

Or maybe it was the Google search that blipped from HOWL to Ginsberg to (how? how? I can’t remember!) writing ABOUT music to watching a clip from the Colbert show with his guest, music essayist and blogger Carl Wilson (http://www.zoilus.com/) talking about his love-hate affair with Celine Dion’s music in his book LET’S TALK ABOUT LOVE: A Journey to the End of Taste (pubbed in the 33 1/3 series by CONTINUUM BOOKS (and yes, they’ve already pubbed a Bruce Springsteen title, darn it).

Slow down. It just came to me. I chanced upon Carl Wilson’s blog after a separate Google hit directed me to a YOUTUBE clip of actor James Franco talking on the Red Carpet about the book Franco was reading and loving: Yes, it was Carl Wilson’s LET’S TALK ABOUT LOVE which I am SO going to buy when I have a few extra shekels; the completist in me will also have to dig in and pick up the Bruce Springsteen title which seems to be more about the BORN IN THE USA album/tour than about Bruce.

(I should also note here that in a great confluence of great worlds colliding, great actor James Franco– have you seen him in MILK? Oh my g-d– is the son of children’s author Betsy Franco. I also learned from one of the Google hits that James Franco is taking creative writing courses at my alma mater, NYU.)

Deep breath.

Talk about following the bouncing ball! That was one long and winding road to get to what I’m really thinking about tonight but as I’ve mentioned time and again, half the beauty of blogging is understanding why you started writing that certain random something. It may not always make sense but when it does, I admit the connections and directions a mind travels is a wondrous thing to behold.

So. Turn the page. The journey continues. (Just see if AAA could make a better TripTik than me.) ;>

And the Beat Goes On.

Prose. Poetry. Pulse. Though not the first to get there, The Beatniks famously brought music and speech together, making jazz out of words and words out of jazz.

Makes me wish I could be a Beat Chick. Who knows. Maybe. One day.

I can’t write music but I hear it. I hear it in everything I write. Even if I never intend those words to be read outloud, I don’t think I can help but write with the rhythm I hear tracking in my brain.

Now would be a good time to play songs from my favorite Dylan album: BLOOD ON THE TRACKS. (Favorite song: YOU’RE A BIG GIRL NOW.) Because even if the stories I write seem confessional and drenched in real-life blood, they’re not necessarily MY confessional or MY blood– but they are the character’s confessions and dripped in the blood of her voice. Think how many times has someone in your family asked you: “Did this really happen?” as if to ask you to pinpoint the date and time in your life the “fiction” you write about took place, as if all diary entries were based in reality, as if everything you write is true. No. Get it. That’s why it’s called art. Writing. Creativity. It happened. To Someone. Someone YOU made up from some artificial bubble that burst one day and turned into a real-life character with a real-life story to tell. If it’s on the page, it’s real. Play it as it lays.

Producer and composer David Amram worked with Jack Kerouac and together the made stories sing. (And what editor hasn’t urged a writer to make her words sing?)

Even if the only music is in your head.

And if you take nothing else away from this jazzy, hip-hop slop of improvised thoughts today, listen to the advice offered by David Amram, speaking for the Beat Voices of another generation: Flush away people who tell you your art is hopeless. Family and friends may love you but if they tell you to the dream is not worth pursuing, you’re hanging out with the wrong people. {}

Yeah, baby. That.

And the beat goes on.