Books

I have a problem with

Books.

No - not a problem 

where I want to complain about them

Like some of my students do. 

No. I just keep

Getting more of them

And keeping them.

And I usually have several going at once,

Like the Vaudeville guy 

With the table full of poles 

Who keeps a plat spinning 

Atop each of them.

A novel.

Or two.

A nonfiction book of useful information,

And a nonfiction book of supposedly useless

Yes fascinating information.

A science book.

A philosophical or theological book.

A book about teaching

(Aren’t they all).

All spinning.

And stacks and stacks more

Waiting

For when I finish one of the others,

Ready to fly into my hands

In front of my eyes.

And what exactly am I looking for?

Mere entertainment?

And why do I take some books out for another

Spin?

What am I looking for

In all those endless pages?

Well, a lot of things.

Fun and escape

And comfort and solace

And challenge and questioning

And shaking myself up

And inspiration

And grounding.

Because I have always found life

Or reality

Or whatever I’m living in

A little overwhelming,

A lot baffling.

My own small lens can’t take it all in,

To make sense out of it.

But books aren’t really spinning plates.

They are lenses.

And every book

Is another person’s attempt

To make a lens

And see some aspect of life

Clearly.

And if I have a enough lenses

Piled up and overlapping

And I keep looking through them

Maybe I can make some kind of sense of things

Instead of standing like the blind men in the poem

(In a book)

Saying the elephant is a

Tree or a rope or a snake

Because they have only touched one part

Of the whole

And assume they have experienced it all.

The books I’ve taken in

And digested

And the ones I’m still chewing on

And the ones still warming on the shelf

All hold this promise.

We can make sense of this mess.

Really.

If you look through enough people’s

Eyes and ears and minds,

One book at a time,

One page at a time,

One word at a time,

I keep hoping that

The plot of the world

Will come into focus.

Books keep me from being trapped in me,

From shrinking the world around me

To fit my own little point of view.

But they enlarge me, too, 

Giving me a wider set of lenses 

To view the world. 

Court Date - on visiting the Supreme Court, June 2018

I walked up Second Street to First.
The court in session, I stood in line -
A twenty minute wait at worst,
To get a glimpse of the famous Nine,
To hear debate or decisions read.
What would be struck or be upheld?
Who can enter? Who gets expelled?
But too many others stood ahead,
Of me, so I was turned away.
To try again some other day.
While up above they upheld "Don't Enter,"
I toured the exhibit in the Visitor's Center.
While up above, they closed a door.
I browsed the Supreme Souvenir Store.








1 The line outside the court dispersed,
2 While inside others would be expelled
3 When earlier rulings were reversed -
4 And shutting out would be upheld.
5 We single out with "Do not enter."
6
7 visitor's center
8 shop

Good Deeds?

They hold up their cardboard signs
Asking for help 
But I seldom give it. 
And I feel guilty. 
But not enough to roll down my window 
And hand them anything
Because of the sneaking suspicion 
They might not be spending my charity
Wisely.  

And last week I saw a man 
Along the main drag in Daytona
With a sign said,
"Why lie? I need beer."
Honest, I suppose, 
But not the honesty that inspired me 
To heights of charity. 
Nobody needs beer. 
I have seen the effects 
Of needing beer up close and personal 
And the smell alone, 
Much less the behavior that goes with it,
Are enough to make me
Back out of a room
Holding my nose. 

But yesterday, we saw him again, 
With his sign that said, 
"Why lie? I need beer." 
Still honest. Still uninspiring. 
But then, his face brightened.
Looking past my car 
Toward the second lane. 
I looked over to see a passenger side window 
On the SUV next to mine
Rolling down, and a a tattooed arm 
Extend out, a hand holding 
A dewy-cold bottle of Corona Ultra. 

And the sign holder took it gratefully. 
As we waited at the light, 
I watched
As he put the beer away for later
In a gunny sack
And hold up his sign again - 
"Why lie? I need beer." -
Because apparently one beer was not enough. 
He still needed more. 

Was that an act of kindness,
A shining example of generosity,
Or charity, 
Or doing unto others as we would have done unto us? 
Or was the man with the tattooed arm
Helping the the man with the cardboard sign
Down a path to self-destruction?
I don't know. 
But I laughed at the absurdity of it,
Even as the questions hung in the air
And followed me home. 

A Room We All Spend Time In

The room is very large.
Big enough for however many friends we have.
50 or 300 or 500 or 1,000.
Plus a little extra space for followers
And some private rooms off to the side
For slightly less public conversations.
The room is inhabited by people
From every era of my life,
From elementary school through college
And beyond,
To first jobs
And second and third and current.
Plus people I've volunteered with,
People I've gone to summer camp with,
And some people I'd never actually met before
Who just happened to also be in the room
Who I know through other friends.
The room is large,
As I said,
But divided by partitions
That make it hard to tell who's currently in the room
Or who's out, or who's paying attention or not.

The strange thing is
The way conversations get started.
The room is full of tall platforms,
And every so often someone -
Sometime me, sometimes someone else -
Stands on a platform
And shouts something to the room at large
Or maybe holds up a gigantic sign or video player.
We shout about what we just ate
Or watched
Or experienced
Or how we're feeling.
We shout about the things that happen to us:
Funny
Frustrating
Tragic
Inspiring.
We shout political statements
And scream our opinions -
Never to a particular person -
But to anyone in the room who happens to be listening.
We just shoot our ideas into the air
With a flare gun that spells out words.

If I did this sort of thing at the grocery store
Or coffee shop
Or post office or public library,
People would think I was insane.
"Everyone!
Watch this video in which
A kitten falls off a window sill!
"Everyone!
I had waffles this morning!
Here's a picture!"
"Everyone!
Here's a political idea I just found somewhere
That I didn't check on to see if it was true!
I agreed with it - and so should you!"

But in this room, no one finds these declarations odd,
Because we all make them.
We all stand on our platforms and shout,
And after we shout,
We wait.
Because then a lot of other people in the room
Start shouting back.
They shout:
"Like!" "Like!" "Like!"
Or "Love!"
Or "Angry!" or "Sad!" or "Haha!" or "Wow!"
Can you picture this happening in a room
Full of real people?
Crazy!
Oh, wait, that's not an option. You only have six -
Unless you comment.
So in addition to shouting single-word responses,
People can stand around the base of your platform
And talk back to you
As well as start to talk to each other
And sometimes argue about how right you are -
Or wrong.
They relate their own experience to this topic,
The commiserate.
They comfort.
They clamor.
They hold up TV screens with little moving images.
They make faces at you and at each other.

Or rather -
They hold up masks that make faces.
Masks - because no one in this room
Is completely real. 
We are all personas
Constructed for this space -
Carefully curated versions of ourselves
Created for the benefit of everyone else
Who's in this room.

So when the comments start
And I feel like
People from different parts of my life
Are communicating with each other -
A kid from my second grade class
And co-worker from the newspaper
Interact with a teacher I had in high school -
Is it really those people talking,
Or just their masks?

I look down from my platform and see them talking
And jump down to join them.
And there's something intriguing but jarring
About finding
Fifteen people from my life
Who have never met each other before -
Or even met the other versions of me
They each know -
All chatting together.
And sometimes it's good fun
Having all these people together
In this vast, vast room.
Gathered cozily at the base of my platform.

That is, until someone says something rude,
Or at least in disagreement,
Which in this room is the same as rude.
And sometimes people leave the room for a while.
Or things escalate and get tense -
And I have to leave the room for a while.

Because here is the other thing with this room:
It has areas.
Areas for people with different views of things.
And some people tend to cluster all the way to the right
Or all the way to the left
And everywhere in between
Or sometimes they're hanging from the chandelier
And you'd don't know where they stand because they aren't actually standing at all.

People tend to cluster
At their end of the room
Where the people on their platforms
All agree with them,
And the Likes are all alike
And the comments all agree.
And the more time you spend
At your end of the room,
The more you know
That you're RIGHT,
And everybody else is WRONG.

And when you do run into people from the other side of the room,
You Like them less and less,
And like them less and less, too.
And if you dislike them enough,
You can simply pull down a lever
To remove them as a friend
And a trap door opens beneath their feet
And they are GONE
From your room for good,
And you can go back to your friends
Who tell you what you want to hear.

Of course, you don't notice him,
Because he's so ubiquitous,
Yet also invisible,
But there's this guy -
We can call him Al -
Who guides you around the room
Gently.
He doesn't tell you,
"Listen to them!" or "Ignore them!"
He simply guides you around in such a way
That you seldom see the people
Or hear the voices
That might make you uncomfortable.
Al takes you along the well-worn carpet
To visit the places you like to go
Full of friendly faces and familiar ideas.
It's almost as if, when you're with Al,
The room grows smaller,
Cozier.
More intimate.
But you are never really aware of Al.
Because he doesn't want you to be.

And when I'm in this room
I can feel liked
and I can try to share my
Best self with the world,
Because these rooms are big enough
To hold the whole world,
And being here makes me feel like I am
Doing things,
And affecting change,
and improving the world outside,
But without every having to leave this room.

But this room,
Which stands before us
Like a land of dreams,
Full of platforms and signs and flashing screens
And trap doors
And well-worn carpet
And people yelling out their emotions
From underneath their masks,
Is not the world.
It feels like my world
This room.
 But everyone else here
Thinks
It is their world too.

If it existed as a real place,
We would run out,
Revulsed by the cartoonish
Madness of it.
But instead,
We sit and click and type,
And think, because this room's vastness
Is confined to a few inches by a few inches of rectangle
That we are in control of it.

Game Show

Game shows -
That most trivial of pursuits,
On at seven and seven-thirty -
Allow us to invite a host
And his guests into our living rooms
To spin wheels
To question answers
(which is something more of us should do, really)
To find fortunes
Or at least a year's supply of Advil
Or Rice-a-Roni
The San Francisco treat.

We watch and it's always
Exactly
The
Same
Exactly
The
Same
Exactly
But just
The
A little
Same
Different.

It's a ritual
Minus the religion
(Unless that happens to be as category
You can take for four-hundred).

And yet...
And yet...
this year
I have found it
Oddly affirming that when we are in such
Jeopardy
Of losing sight of what
Is fact
Or false
Or real
Or alternative -
Every night
There is this shining reminder
That some questions
Get the affirmative beep
And some get buzzed
And there is no talk of
Politics
(Unless that happens
To be a category you take
For six-hundred)
Or perspectives.
Some things are facts.
Some responses are incorrect.
Reality is actually something we can agree on.
There's just an occasional
Glitch,
And the judges correcting
An incorrect question
And adding or subtracting
Dollar amounts
That leave no doubt
That the truth has real value
That can't be argued with
And that it can even
Determine if you end up with a cash prize
Or Advil.