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On waking up in the wrong country

On waking up in the wrong country

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Life is hard. We lose sometimes. We lose what we love. We lose friends, time, jobs, hope, faith.

Life is not fair. Winners don’t always deserve to win. Losers often do not deserve to lose.

We love those who don’t always love us.

We want the idea of fairness. But we also want to win even if we don’t deserve it.

We want love even if we don’t give it. And if we give it, we can’t control what is done with it. And we resent that.

So we seek the Leader who will fix everything. Great leaders inspire us to work together for it. But we often want the illusion of a Great Leader instead.

The one who promises us everything with no price to pay, no work to be done. The Easy Way. The scapegoat to stone. Without responsibilty for having thrown.

It’s hard to ge a grown up. Easier to have the illusion of adulthood while giving away our power to the one with all the easy answers.

And so we vote the easy way, against our best interests.

And, perhaps, we wake up. But it is easier to keep sleeping.

I am pleased to announce that my latest poetry collection, Geographies of the Dead, has been released by Kelsay Books.

I am pleased to announce that my latest poetry collection, Geographies of the Dead, has been released by Kelsay Books.

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Copies may be purchased directly from the publisher https://tinyurl.com/2etx67uk or through Amazon https://tinyurl.com/mrymzy65. I will have copies I can personalize and sign for you soon.

Geographies of the Dead’s elegies, written to memorialize individuals, also speaks to the universal experience of loss while its meditations explore the absences that return to us in memory or as ghosts in dreams. The poems have been described as “revelatory,” “powerful,” “haunting,” and “eloquently crafted.” While offering no answers to the unanswerable, the collection explores accommodations with death though science, the natural world, and our common human experience.

The following either have poems dedicated to them and/or elegies written about them:

• Betty Baker
• Donald Bivens
• Richard “Rick” Brehm
• Larry Cramer
• Dominic Deluka
• Richard Dine
• William “Bill” Hidenfelter
• Galway Kinnell
• Thomas Kon
• Doris Roe
• Starr Dave Sam (nee Nejma Dawood)
• William “Bill” Shuter
• Don Staake
• Jane Wallace
And my mother, Ann. and father, Tony.