“What you’ve done becomes the judge of what you’re going to do – especially in other people’s minds. When you’re traveling, you are what you are right there and then. People don’t have your past to hold against you. No yesterdays on the road.”
~William Least Heat Moon
Author William Least Heat-Moon speaking in the Microsoft Auditorium of the Central Library, Seattle, Washington, 10 November 2008 (Photo credit: Joe Mabel, via Wikipedia)
Regurgitated lives lie between us
gray puddles reflecting
open air—
watered sounds,
reticent ripples rearing
wanderlust eyes, consumed in flesh.
* Busy week indeed – my first attempt at poetry since the book hit e-reader publication last week. Since then, of course, things have only gotten more hectic. Launched a Facebook page for proper social media marketing, the book’s now hit print, and we’re waiting on reviewers from across the board. Between all that, the mind’s been quite boggled, and it’s been a challenge to find time just to sit down and write, let alone to give the mind over to the purely poetic. Thankfully, camping this weekend helped retrieve a bit of my sanity, and garnered more than a few pages of new writing.
Darker piece this week, and shorter, to be sure, but I hope you enjoy all the same. As ever – critiques and comments welcome!
At the Beach
It’s been a while, and a long weekend to boot. In sum: got some sun, traipsed some beaches, wondered and waxed philosophic and photographic somewhere between the trees and the waves, and tasted of the delicious sensation known as BBQ. It was a long weekend, but a good one, and I can honestly say it was the most relaxing I’ve had a good long while, even if I was still running all over the place.
I get the wanderlust, you know?
Big Red
C’est la vie, though, as they say. To those Americans among my readership, here’s hoping the fourth of July (the USA’s Independence Day, for those of you not up-to-the-know on your history of the land of the stars and stripes) was a delightful blend of summer warmth and rapturous relaxation with those you hold most dear. Plus, if you got to see some of the shiny explosions that were lighting up the country’s night sky, all the more power to you.
What’s the night without a little boom? Whether it’s a spiritual or a physical or even a metaphorical boom, well, that’s really up to your preference. I’m just the humble fellow wishing you a good time, regardless.
But I digress…and supposing you One Stoppers have sifted through my silliness and well-wishes, I’d like to kick off my return and the week with my latest submission to One Stop Poetry’s One Shot Wednesday, a tanka titled: “By the Sea“…
Sunlight on white sand
Refracted in pillowed veils
Hiding sand castles
Bronzed amidst unyielding tides
Sprouted in short-short visions.
Lake Cadillac, Michigan
I have returned! And that means pictures, poems, and (soon enough) short stories on the way.
The great Sleeping Bear Dunes, and beyond that, Lake Michigan.
So where did I go? To the north! What does that mean? If you know anything of Michigan, what that means is the beauty of Traverse City, the vast pine and maple beech forests of the northern lower peninsula, and the breathtaking scale of the sweeping sand dunes known as Sleeping Bear Dunes.
I have a case of this thing known as Wanderlust, you see. It demands I go places when the mood settles too deeply within me. Thus, away I went. Try not to be too offended if it happens from time to time.
More to the point, I still have to finish posting the work I completed in Colorado, but for today at least, that’s going on hold to make room for the pair of poems I made while off on this week’s travels. To begin, a simple haiku:
Breathless blue romance
By the blooming emerald hills;
How vibrant life stirs.
The Waking Den 