Loose Leaf Notes

Poetry pings
but doesn’t pick up
It can’t be tracked
and doesn’t call back

Sometimes it pocket-dials
as an unknown caller
whose voicemail you listen to
over and over

_________Colleen Redman / Poets and Storytellers United

1. I came across THIS artist in an old People Magazine: Sam Cox, known professionally as Mr. Doodle, who spent the past two years covering every inch of his 1.5-million$ home in drawings.

2. In the BBC interview, Cox said doodling is “almost like an out-of-body experience. You’re just indulging yourself in this free-flowing state of creation.”

3. Yes, I’m a doodler. I also like noodles by the oodles.

4. I tried to play the word suey during a recent Scrabble game but, apparently, according to the Scrabble dictionary, “suey” isn’t a word unless it’s preceded by the word “chop.”

5. Recent research suggests that doodling (spontaneous drawing) and fidgeting (spontaneous body movement) might actually help us to maintain focus and/or reduce stress that interferes with focus, which is why I always take my highlight pens to meetings.

6. My favorite doodle poem is HERE.

7. A friend recently posted a haiku poem about sleep. The poem wasn’t so bad even though it wasn’t a haiku and it was created by AI.

8. A Massachusetts Congressman recently delivered a believable speech on the House floor using ChatGPT, an artificial intelligence chatbox tool. He later explained that he wanted to highlight what was coming and promote discussion on purposeful policy so we wouldn’t be caught off guard, like we were with social media.

9. Poetry is a dousing tool for depth psychology.

10. When Google and Doodle Converge: I typed a poem’s line / and changed it three times / then printed out a page / to mark my best aim / to mix the ink of last and first / to merge synapses of right and left / to draw conclusions / and liberate free verse / back to the drawing board / where poets work.

11. “We’re only as sick as our secrets. The Buddha said three things cannot be hidden for long: the sun, the moon, and the truth. In other words: the truth always comes out. Unfortunately, it doesn’t always come out in healthy ways. Often, it comes out, not as words, but as illness. Repressed anger can come out as cancer. Repressed hurt can come out as addiction. But the truth is always “shining through,” asking to be known.” – Paul Weinfield

12. “I’m not dead yet, but I plan to be.” My friend Karl at a recent Death Café gathering.

13. And someone at the Death Cafe read Mary Oliver’s When Death Comes  …like the hungry bear in autumn; / when death comes and takes all the bright coins / from his purse / to buy me, and snaps the purse shut; / when death comes / like the measle-pox… When it’s over, I want to say all my life / I was a bride married to amazement. / I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms…

_____________Thirteen Thursday

Without Love, Where Would We Be Now 1 HERE.

Aka: Diss calculus? (Excerpts from past posts on the subject)

-Dyscalculia is described as a math dyslexia, and it’s true that in school algebra and word math problems related to time and distances made me feel like I was going to have a seizure, but dyscalculia is so much more than that. It’s a neurological disorder that affects sense of direction (up, down, left, right), impairs the ability to picture geographical location and mechanical processes, to balance checkbooks, read music, clocks and maps, count back money/change, remember a sequence of instruction, put names with faces and more. But maybe I’m in good company. Albert Einstein in his own words: “School came as a bore to me. It took up far too much time… I felt a downright fear of the mathematics class. The teacher pretended that algebra was a natural affair, to be taken for granted, whereas I didn’t even know what numbers really were. They were not flowers, not animals, not fossils; they were nothing that could be imagined, mere quantities that resulted from counting. To my confusion these quantities were now represented by letters, which signified sounds, so that it became impossible to hear them, so to speak.”

-Do you have difficulty reading graphs or charts? Do you have trouble learning athletic movements, dance steps, or anything that requires you to move your body in a certain sequence? Do you find it hard to stick to a budget or keep track of your finances? Do you find it difficult to do mental math and find yourself giving incorrect change or calculating a wildly inaccurate tip? Do you forget phone numbers or addresses, even just a few moments after they were said to you? Do you misplace objects around the house or get lost in familiar areas? Do you lose track when counting and need to use visual aids — like fingers — to help count? You likely have dyscalculia. Dyscalculia can be the cause of problems with time management, spatial recognition, and motor functions. Dyscalculia, often referred to as “math dyslexia,” is a learning disability (LD) that makes math problems confusing.

-As someone with dyscalculia, the time change is especially difficult because there’s a big component of directional and number impairment with the disability. Not only do I have to calculate every clock I see, I have to remember if the time went forward or backwards and which clocks have been changed and which ones haven’t.

-I still remember the first time I heard Peter Rabbit by Beatrix Potter.  It was read out loud by my kindergarten teacher Mrs. Golden.   I can viscerally recall how tense I was and scared for Peter, who couldn’t find the gate out of Mr. McGregor’s farm so that he could get back home.  It’s interesting that I was so affected by the story and that it has been a theme in my life. I have dyscalculia, am terrible with directions and get anxiety about being lost.

-Playing chess is like driving in a city, and the chess pieces are like cars confusing me by going every which way in different directions.  In an online list of specific symptoms that people like me with dyscalculia have, it actually says:  Limited strategic planning ability for games like chess.

-Because I have Dyscalculia I can’t decide if my standards have gotten higher or lower.

-Dyscalculia sufferers may be easily become disoriented and have little or no sense of direction. They often have difficulties with time, measurement, left/right orientation, rules in games and spatial reasoning. But people with dyscalculia are often exceptional at reading and writing. People with dyscalculia are intuitive thinkers and are good at interpreting reality and processing knowledge, experiences and signs around them.

-As someone with dyscalculia who had a hard time reading analog clocks as a girl, I loved this story from This American Life: “Carl Duzen got a graduate degree in physics. He studied motion, electromagnetism. He spent a lot of his life deep in the study of space and time of numbers. He taught physics and mathematics for years. Carl was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s a year and a half ago at age 79. So, after decades of adulthood, it is suddenly appropriate for a 40-year-old doctor to ask him questions like, can you tell me who the president is? Or, can you “draw a clock?”  “So I got a piece of paper. No matter what I– I just– I couldn’t– I couldn’t do it. Why is that so hard?” Carl said. To be clear, it’s not necessarily how to draw a clock that is difficult but figuring out why he couldn’t draw a clock.

Carl sat with his tools and his paper and his physicist’s desire to decompose the problem before him. He draws a very precise circle, split it into twelfths, and scrawled the words “superposition of three types” in tiny letters in the corner of the page. He explains, with Susan’s help, there are three layers of information here. There’s the hours that are represented from 1 through 12, even though there are 24 hours in a day. But then, there’s the second layer, which is the minutes. And a 1 represents not a 1 anymore, but 5 minutes. And a 2 represents 10. But Carl adds, after that layer is the second hand, which is now measuring 1 through 60 seconds. By the end of all this, I can’t believe this is the system we have for telling time. It’s insane. It’s a miracle anyone can ever just glance at their wrist and capture information, something Carl works very hard at…”

Dyscalculia is a mathematical disability that can occur in people from across the whole IQ range – often higher than average – along with difficulties with time, measurement, and spatial reasoning… The term was coined in the 1940s, but it was not until 1974 when the word was completely recognized by the work of a Czechoslovakian researcher Ladislav Kosc. When his work came out he defined the work as “a structural disorder of mathematical abilities.” His research proved that this learning disability was caused by impairments to certain parts of the brain that control mathematical calculations, and it was not because these people were ‘mentally handicapped…”- Wikipedia

-I was in denial about what kind of speller I was until the computer Spell Check came along and proved me to be less than average at it. Even more of a surprise was that when I looked at the corrected spelling of a word alongside my version of it, I sometimes couldn’t see any difference. My dad was an even worse speller. Whenever one of us kids would ask him how to spell something his answer was always the same and would go like this: “Daddy, how do you spell decision?” “It begins with a D,” he would announce. The various forms of dyslexia and dyscalculia that run in my family and cause me to consistently misspell words like decision, exercise, or restaurant also causes me to cut other people grammatical slack. When someone sends me an email or a blog comment with a grammatical error or word misspelled, I don’t get out my red pen. Sometimes I find it endearing.

-As a person with dyscalculia (a spatial learning disability), I have been traumatized in the past by trying to follow practices that hint at anything with choreographed steps, preferring instead impromptu movement, freestyle dancing, and not balancing my checkbook. Also, since my husband does a few kinds of marital arts, practices more than one meditation tradition, and is engaged in a growing number of therapeutic modalities related to his counseling practice, I find that I have swung to the opposite end of the spectrum, becoming somewhat of a hooky-playing rebel skeptic in balance to him.

-I’m so directional dyslexic (aka dyscalculic) that when I’m getting around places I don’t know, I grab on to Joe and let him lead the way.  I recently referred to him as my “seeing eye dog.”

-A dyscalculia poem not written by me:  I can’t write Haikus / I have dyscalculia / But I hope this worked – Ravyn LaRue

1. George Santos is the Anna Sorokin of politics.

2. I just did my first online Zoom poetry reading with a group of dVerse poets from around the world. It was a good experience and the host was wonderful, but it was a little like contra dancing as opposed to free style dance. I love to dance on my own, and I like contra dancing too, but it can be a little too intensely social for me.

3. Posted on Facebook the day David Crosby died: I’m glad you didn’t cut your hair.

4. Then I went about singing it all day

5. The Poetry Bank Account: I gave it all away / spent it all in one place / Now I’m doubting / my literary ability / and checking the sofas / for loose change

6. I have an imaginary sister blog called “loose change” as opposed to “loose leaf notes.”

7. Zoom Meetings remind me of Hollywood squares meets the Brady Bunch.

8. “When in doubt, zoom out. Ignore the cult of doom and gloom and embrace the cause of zoom and boom. We will laugh at the stupidity of evil and hate, and summon the brilliance of praise and create. Life is crazily in love with us-wildly and innocently in love with us. The universe always gives us exactly what we need, exactly when we need it.” – Rob Brezsny

9. Astrologer/musician Rob Brezsny uses first-person narrative in his horoscope columns, as well as a more literary approach than conventional horoscopes use. He conceives of astrology not as a science but as “a poetic language of the soul”, comparing it to “a Neruda poem, Kandinsky paintings or a Nick Cave song.” The Utne Reader described the column as “a blend of spontaneous poetry, feisty politics, and fanciful put-on.” Brezsny is quoted as saying “I’m on a mission to save people from the genocide of the imagination,” and told the NYT that his “secret agenda” is “to be a poet who gets paid for writing poetry.” “I predict the present. I don’t believe in predicting the future,” he said.

10. She liked tunnels but not bridges / rooms rather than open floor plans / documentaries more than biopics / and gingerbread more than brownies… From Self Portrait in Eulogy

11. My Death Class Poetry Reading with my fellow poet friend Katherine is in the news HERE. 

12. Next Stop on the Soulful Aging Tour: Reveries of the Mind: We might forget a name but remember what is beautiful. We might revere a memory or re-name cognitive decline as “transcendence.” Taking our leave takes time… More HERE. 

13. “Our fear of death is like our fear that summer will be short, but when we have had our swing of pleasure, our fill of fruit, and our swelter of heat, we say we have had our day.” -Ralph Waldo Emerson

____________Thirteen Thursday

We’re losing our minds and acting our age with an honest delving into the expanding horizon that comes with the narrowing of life.

We’re working on it. It’s a trio this time.  Katherine Chantal and I will be joined by Mary Wiley for our next Soulful Aging poetry reading.

We might forget a name but remember what is beautiful. We might revere a memory or re-name cognitive decline as “transcendence.”

Taking our leave takes time.

“Do you know I’m leaving / That the door is within sight / As you go about living…” Mary asks.

“Show me yourself / I will hold your gaze / of eternal love / Even when you slip away / into moments…” Katherine says.

“If life’s creation can’t be destroyed / but only changes form / then nothing is ever thrown away / It just moves from room to room…” suggests Colleen.

More to come…

_________Poets and Storytellers United 

-The following is an article by Neil Harvey on the Death and Bereavement class that Katherine Chantal and I were invited to read our poetry for. It appeared in Radford University’s Highlanders in the News January 13, 2022

Robert Frost said poetry occurs “when an emotion has found its thought, and the thought has found words.”

Frost won four Pulitzer Prizes in his field and knew well of what he spoke, so in light of his perspective, it makes sense that writing could also be useful as a tool in counseling.

About two dozen Radford University graduate students in the course “Death, Loss, Grief and Bereavement” recently got firsthand experience with poems as therapy, initially as an audience and then as composers of their own works.

“One of the things that we look at is the use of the creative arts as a way for people who are grieving to express themselves,” explained Alan Forrest, Ed.D., a professor in the Department of Counselor Education. “And the general goal of grief therapy is to help people externalize the wide array of different emotions that they’re experiencing internally, through the creative arts, and in this particular case, through poetry, both listening to poetry and then talking about it.”

On Nov. 8, 2022, Forrest invited two local authors to his class – Colleen Redman and Katherine Chantal. Over the past months, the pair have given interactive readings at the Little River Poetry Festival and Floyd, Virginia’s Jesse Peterman Memorial Library, among other stops.

Chantal recently published “Poetic Memoir of a Nascent Senescent: Poems from My Sixties,” and Redman is the author of numerous books, including 2004’s “The Jim and Dan Stories,” in which she wrote about losing two brothers in the same year.

The authors read to the class – pieces largely about loss – then asked the audience to share their own similar reflections.

“The last hour of the night was spent with the students, reading their heartfelt and poetic statements that came from talking,” Redman wrote of the experience in a post on her blog. “There were goosebumps, sighs and knowing nods. It was a meaningful sharing all around.”

She recently said she believes almost any art can be applied to counseling, particularly writing.

“You’re putting into words things that can’t be put into words, so you’re doing it indirectly. Poetry can help. You can use metaphors; you can get even deeper,” she said, citing the example of her own work and her writing about the passing of her brothers.

“Not only did I feel like it made me a better writer and gave me confidence, it helped me through my grief,” Redman said. “I feel like it made me a better person to have the experience of that loss and to feel and understand that when they left, a part of me left, but a part of them lives in me.”

“And I think [the students] have to be empathetic to be able to be good counselors. To be able to witness grief and sit with it and not be uncomfortable … and just witness people.”

The poetry was also in line with the course’s primary tracks, which are the academic as well as the practical.

“They’re learning the different theory strategies and therapeutic interventions to use and working with clients, which is important because we’re a professional training program,” Forrest explained.

“Another thing that is of equal if not greater importance is for them to become aware of their own thoughts, feelings, beliefs about death and loss, grief and bereavement, so that when they are sitting in the sacred space of a therapy room, and those issues come up, they don’t freeze.”

Whitney Harrison, a graduate student from Giles County who’s studying clinical mental health, participated in the exercise and wrote about the various paths her life had taken, routes that led her through both academia and motherhood.

“I found it to be incredibly powerful because poetry is not something that you’re taught in a class to necessarily do with people,” Harrison said. “And yet, being in that room and watching all these people share their feelings, different things came out for different people, and it was very impactful for everyone.

“It obviously moved several people,” she added. “And I think if you’re going to be vulnerable, being vulnerable in a room full of future counselors is the place to be. Incredibly safe. And the poets themselves were just so warm and accepting and inviting in that space.” -Neil Harvey

I gave it all away
spent it all in one place
Now I’m doubting
my literary ability
and checking the sofas
for loose change

__________Colleen Redman / Poets and Storytellers United

1. Yes, we’ve been watching the Monty Python documentary on Netflix.

2. And with episodes in 6 parts, it really is the Full Monty.

3. Just when I think nothing is happening, something does.

4. Like venison cooking lessons with my 14-year-old grandson who shot his first deer this year.

5. I love to look at pictures that involve the Droste effect, which is something like a never-ending fractal. When I was a kid, we had a book with a picture of a woman holding a book with a picture of her holding a book on the cover, and so on, that I studied and wondered how far it went.

6. “The “Droste effect,” is named after a 1904 package of Droste brand cocoa. The mathematical interest in these packaging illustrations is their implied infinity. If the resolution of the printing process—(and the determination and eyesight of the illustrator)—were not limiting factors, it would go on forever. A package within a package within a package… Like Russian dolls.” Wikipedia

7. I’m a member.

8. This is my practice: “The mystic Thomas a Kempis said that when you go out into the world, you return having lost some of yourself. Until you learn to inhabit your aloneness, the lonely distraction and noise of society will seduce you into false belonging, with which you will only become empty and weary. When you face your aloneness, something begins to happen. Gradually, the sense of bleakness changes into a sense of true belonging. This is a slow and open-ended transition but it is utterly vital in order to come into rhythm with your own individuality. In a sense this is the endless task of finding your true home within your life. It is not narcissistic, for as soon as you rest in the house of your own heart, doors and windows begin to open outwards to the world. No longer on the run from your aloneness, your connections with others become real and creative. You no longer need to covertly scrape affirmation from others or from projects outside yourself. This is slow work; it takes years to bring your mind home.” John O’Donohue

9. The sun was her psychedelic of choice / The ocean her love language / Her childhood heroes were Annie Oakley and Peter Pan / A camera was the first thing she bought / after getting paid for her first job at a daycare… Read The Eulogy in its entirety HERE. 

10. “I woke to the sound of nurses by my bed, discussing their Christmas plans. I thought I was talking to them, but they didn’t reply. I was aware of an existence, a me within my body. Had I disappeared?” Those are the words of Lotje Sodderland, the video diarist who suffered a traumatic brain injury from a stroke and is the subject of the Netflix documentary My Beautiful Broken Brain.

12. She also said this about her state following the brain injury: “It’s a heightened sense of reality. Euphoric. I can experience colors and sounds like I wasn’t able to before. So intensified. So exaggerated. Time has a new meaning. It’s all elongated and transient…  Recovery is learning to live a new life, and so in that way it is a re-birth and you realize that recovery is a chance to recreate your life and it’s a chance to kind of, make your song, your personality, the way you want it to be. . .The more hope I have about how things will get better, the more I recover.”

13. I learned that writing and reading are based in entirely different parts of the brain, meaning Lotje could learn to write again, but she couldn’t read what she had written.  She also said to deal with what the brain couldn’t do she had to focus on what matters, which often wasn’t reading or writing.

________Thirteen Thursday

Colleen Redman grew up as one of nine siblings on a peninsula in the South Shore of Boston, MA during the ‘50s – ‘60s.  Since 1991, she has lived with her husband in a cabin off the scenic Blue Ridge Parkway in Floyd, a rural Virginia county known for its mountain culture, roots music, small farm homesteads and a flourishing art scene, which she relocated to in 1985.  She has two grown sons and two grandsons, keeps a small flock of chickens and tends a large garden. She is a blogger (looseleafnotes.com) who has written and photographed extensively for The Floyd Press newspaper and other regional publications.  Her poetry has most recently been published in the Artemis Journal and Floyd County Moonshine.

Losing two brothers a month apart in 2001 was a life-changing event that spurred Redman’s study of death and was the impetus behind her 2003 book The Jim and Dan Stories, which was included in a curriculum for a Radford University grief and loss class for counselors before it went out of print. With the loss of her brothers, Redman let herself descend into “the trenches of grief’s frontline.” She wrote, “If I can describe what I see from inside this hole, will it help others when they are down in one? What place is this? How deep does it go? I want to know. I’ve never been here before.” Her brothers’ deaths were followed by the passing of her father, her older sister and mother.

In 2017, Redman’s poetry collection Packing a Suitcase for the Afterlife was published by Finishing Line Press and reviewed by poet and creative writing teacher Felicia Mitchell:  “She has, paradoxically, told the untold , touching on that which resides both in dreams and in life and in the borders between…” Poet and novelist Jim Minick wrote: “Loss tempered by wonder, love radiating like the moon (a bowl fired by the sun”), these poems track a life, playful yet dark, frank and funny, yet somber…”

Packing a Suitcase for the Afterlife was followed by the 2021 publication of Objects are Closer Than They Appear, described by the poet as “a distillation through the rear-view mirror of poetic memoir where every remnant pulled from a dream or a memory resonates with an afterlife, as if a visitation from the same place my dead loved ones are, closer than they seem.”

As with her first two poetry collections, the poems that appear in Poems from the Dark Room are the basis of Redman’s “Grief and Relief: Soulful Aging Tour,” the call-and-response poetry readings that she does with fellow poet and author of Poetic Memoir of a Nascent Senescent, Katherine Chantal. They represent a deepening and a charting of the inner-life adventure, one that has come closest to touching and trusting the mysteries of life and death, one that brings the grace of grief full circle.  You vow not to forget / love’s lasting imprint / when life has been spent / and time no longer counts you…

NOTE- Poems from the Darkroom is available for purchase at Amazon for $13 and in Floyd at The Harvest Moon Food Store and The Floyd Country Store.

She liked tunnels but not bridges
rooms rather than open floor plans
documentaries more than biopics
and gingerbread more than brownies

She teared-up when she saw
Andrew Wyeth’s art in a D.C. museum
and listened to every song
that Mark Knopfler ever recorded

She said, “I always feel more prepared
when I have a toy in my pocketbook”
and “Whenever I don’t know what it is I’m doing
and it borders on wasting my time, I call it research”

She liked to people watch and thrift shop
She marched for peace and cherished children
She said, “As far as I can determine, I’m a Jungian Taoist
who might have been a Transcendentalist
if I lived in the time of Emerson and Thoreau”

She wasn’t a leader or a follower
but a party of one, she said
“I’m a fiscally conservative independent
who votes Democrat because they represent my views
on civil rights, women’s rights, labor rights
and the environment better than their counterpart”

Her Irish ear for words took root in childhood
with nursery rhymes, fairytales and jump rope songs
and she knew she was meant to be a poet
after hearing Leonard Cohen sing Suzanne

The sun was her psychedelic of choice
The ocean her love language
Her childhood heroes were Annie Oakley and Peter Pan
A camera was the first thing she bought
after getting paid for her first job at a daycare

As she got older she said, “I’m writing poetry
that lets the psyche guide the itinerary
because the days are small, packed tightly together,
not much room for last minute changes”

Bird watcher, shell collector, tea drinker, vegetable gardener
She was a long hauler before there was a name for it
Her friend Luke said she danced
like a pollinating bee going for nectar
She was a beach town girl who went back to the land
to live in a cabin and keep a flock of chickens

Being mother to her two sons
was the highlight of her life
Marrying her husband Joe the reward
Her siblings were the song of her heart
Her grandchildren the charmed encore

She liked to quote Eknath Easwaran
about choosing only one mantra for meditation
‘If you dig shallow wells in many places
you will never go deep enough to find water’
“And that applies to life,” she said

In her poetry book “Packing a Suitcase for the After Life”
she wrote, “In lieu of death send the living flowers
Make your life payable to all those you love”

______________Colleen Redman / Poets and Storytellers United / dVerse Poets Pub

1. Gavel or grovel?

2. I was sure I was going to see another on camera slap when Kevin McCarthy walked up to Matt Gaetz HERE.

3. “When the North Star of your own faith is becoming obscured, when you feel as if you’re in stormy seas and low visibility, who are the lighthouses? John Lennon was ours.” U2’s Bono on John

4. “Leonard Cohen said his teacher once told him that the older you get, the lonelier you become, and the deeper the love you need. This is because, as we go through life, we tend to over-identify with being the hero of our stories. This hero isn’t exactly having fun: he’s getting kicked around, humiliated, and disgraced. But if we can let go of identifying with him, we can find our rightful place in the universe, and a love more satisfying than any we’ve ever known. People constantly throw around the term “hero’s journey” without having any idea what it really means. Everyone from CEOs to wellness influencers thinks the hero’s journey means facing your fears, slaying a dragon, and gaining 25k followers on Instagram. But that’s not the real hero’s journey…

5. “…In the real hero’s journey, the dragon slays YOU. Much to your surprise, you couldn’t make that marriage work. Much to your surprise, you turned forty with no kids, no house, and no prospects. Much to your surprise, the world didn’t want the gifts you proudly offered it. If you are foolish, this is where you will abort the journey and start another, and another, abusing your heart over and over for the brief illusion of winning. But if you are wise, you will let yourself be shattered, and return to the village, humbled, but with a newfound sense that you don’t have to identify with the part of you that needs to win, needs to be recognized, needs to know. This is where your transcendent life begins.” – Paul Weinfield

6. I’ve been looking for a word to describe the stage of life I am now inhabiting, the time after childhood, romance, finding vocation, raising kids and experiencing the joy of little grandkids. Some people call the slowing down of elder years, the golden years, but I think “the transcendent years” is a better description, as in the beginning of living beyond the range of normal or merely human experience, a delving into and readying for experiences that takes you out of yourself and into something larger and beyond comprehension. It’s a long stage, as was the other stages, one that takes time.

7. From the Merriam Webster dictionary:  Did you know? The Latin verb scandere means “to climb”, so transcend has the basic meaning of climbing so high that you cross some boundary. A transcendent experience is one that takes you out of yourself and convinces you of a larger life or existence; in this sense, it means something close to “spiritual,” or as I like to say, Become the air for others to breathe, a memory that floats like a fragrance.

8. I once got through being stuck on the road in a snowstorm for hours by imagining that I had died. I was separated from my family but knew they would get by and could live their lives without me. I was busy navigating this new situation and doing what I needed to do to acclimate, just like if I was dead, I imagined.

9. My skin thins translucent / like frosted glass on a night sky view / where a veil is lifting / on an obscured constellation / that tracks the arc of life / It landmarks the ages / as my form rearranges / diffusing before it passes / before the soul eclipses / the body’s last remains… Read Eclipse in its entirety HERE.

10. HERE’S a review of my poetry collection Poems From the Dark Room and here’s my blogger poet friend Ron with the collection. It was captioned “Just got the mail. Fine reading ahead, I’m SURE.  Thanks, CR!”

11. I just bought a new voice recorder but there were no instructions on use except for a sentence saying that the instructions were on the device internally, but how can I find the instructions without instructions for how to find them.

“…all you can manage, lying / in the still-dark darkness / is to tell yourself that you’re / not really there, your eyes / aren’t really open yet, you’re / happy living in the dark…” Read Ron’s poem Annual Postponement in its entirety HERE. 

13. Life is stranger than fiction. The proof is HERE.

__________Thirteen Thursday