This morning I learned of a new poetic form (well, new to me) called the golden shovel. The rules are simple: take a line of poetry from someone else and make each word the last word of a line in your new poem. If the line has six words, the new poem will have six…
Details Both Blurred and Fine
I’m surrounded by mountains and haven’t hiked very much. This morning I wrote a poem based loosely on the image of the sunset and hues of purple in the sky and in the hilly silhouettes that I often see when I’m driving. For now, I feel more content to be driving through these mountains as…
Thanksgiving 2021
You haven’t truly felt the holiday spirit and warmth of the season until you’ve spent part of your Thanksgiving in a room at the Red Roof Inn just off the highway with a 65-70 pound dog whining at you because he’s bored and, like you, doesn’t really want to be holed up in a room…
Yellow-Light Matt
I’m convinced that my timing is worse than what most people experience. I wish I could say it was part of my aw shucks, hapless sap type of charm… a Charlie Brown lovable loser vibe… but some days it feels less charming and more loser-like than others. My ex-wife used to call me yellow-light Matt…
The Car: One More Year?
The dog is on the floor a few feet away chewing on a bone. Every time I look over, he wags his tail – he wants to play. We’ll be taking our first long-ish trip together when we head to Bucks County for the Thanksgiving weekend. I’ve never traveled with a dog before – let…
Looking at a Rubber Band
On the mornings like today and earlier this week when I’ve found a groove with writing and playing with ideas and words, I don’t want to stop. I resent the need to stop, the need to pay attention to the clock, to get a shower and walk the dog and drive to work all to…
Getting Tripped Up
I haven’t written in a while. More precisely, I’ve been writing and re-writing the same thing for about a week – a micro treatise on how I get tripped up by Buddhism, relationships, and the awkward space between ambivalence and ambition; past, future, and present; action and inaction…. “the middle way.” Last weekend, my daughter…
Home(less)
As someone who writes about, thinks about, and pines over the meaning, nuance, and emotional tug of the word home, I seldom acknowledge how privileged I am to even have the space to pontificate or lament or yearn. In my personal world, I’m almost always talking about the emotional sense of the word – less…
The Origins of Everyday Objects
Just left of the sliding glass door that leads to the back deck and the yard below, the peace lily blooms. A single white flower stretches towards the ceiling – still curled in on itself before its great unveiling. The plant sits on a small pedestal-like storage trunk/ottoman/end table – knee-high and angled in the…
Sorting Through the Morning Tangle
The hard work of writing, for me, is in disciplining my mind to focus on one thing and carrying that idea through to its conclusion. This is true for anything I try to do creatively, or even these silly little blog posts. I suppose practicing would help. When I get this way, I can feel…
Social Media Sobriety
It’s been a little over a week since I began my experiment with social media sobriety. There are times (several per day and mostly at night when I’m alone and bored or struggling to focus) when I miss it – when I expect to see (jones to see) some news from a friend or some…
Home – October 2021
Ever since leaving two years ago, home has been a word that gives me pause. I clutch every time I’m inclined to use it. It’s as if in leaving, I gave up my right to the word. Like friendship and love and lots of other words that contain various depths – I struggle to distinguish…