Thanksgiving and Hendrix

Thanksgiving has always played an interesting role in my life.  Since my birthday is always right around it, I have always felt a certain connection to the holiday.  Even though the history behind it is fairly suspect, that there is a holiday basically devoted to giving thanks is kind of amazing; so I always liked that aspect of it.  But it also seemed like there was often some kind of family drama or fight that would happen.  It was always a strange combination.  My sister wrote her own Thanksgiving poem once which captured this side of the holiday perfectly.  But this poem is more about the giving thanks side of it. This one was a little bit of a mess but there was something there so I reworked it a bit to try and clean it up.  Not quite revisionist history but kinda sorta.

Back when I wrote this I had recently discovered that I shared a birthday with Jimi Hendrix.  There were even a few years there when I celebrated his birthday instead of my own.  I haven't really thought about him in a while but happened to catch part of a History Channel special on Woodstock the other night and watched again the famous performance he did of the national anthem.  All of the people who were being interviewed for the documentary and who were there more or less said the same thing: that Hendrix was on a whole different level than any of the other acts. So I came upon this poem and thought it appropriate to once again give my thanks to him.  I suspect the particular song that I was listening to when I wrote this was likely Hear My Train A-Coming which was always a favorite of mine. 


Thanksgiving                                                      12/12/93

I've been wondering what it was about
this past Thanksgiving
that has kept me from the page.

Something bigger than the page,
wider than this, the Charles;
something arching
in a clouded hue of color
across the silently freezing water.

A reawakening 
to the timeless truth
of our century's clearest soul.
The cracking voice and crashing sound
of Jimi,
dedicating and connecting
with the humm of a chord
to the Cherokee inside himself
and to deep inside us.

Will our will today - 
the sculpture of our passion,
the beaten-on arms and voice 
of the moment's culture - 
be around tomorrow?
Or will it be vultured
into submission,
subsumed 
in these murky waters
of increasing responsibility?
I just can't say

But I can say
Thanks
for learning from you
and for hope
fully feeling you.

Instead a Letter

This poem is from June of 1995, the summer after I graduated from college.  It's strange that letters are now such a rarity.  I used to love to write letters, long letters that rambled and pontificated on and on but were a piece of me in a way that electronic communication can't be.  I miss letters.  Seeing a person through their handwriting, knowing that they wrote it and that it had a tangible connection to the person is something we miss now.  PJ Harvey has a great song about this called aptly 'The Letter'; there is a line in there about "the curve of your 'g'" that sums it all up perfectly.  So it may be a little bit ironic to post a poem about the immediacy of the handwritten word on a blog but I guess this is my way of using the new medium (okay blogging isn't actually new anymore) to expound on the virtues of the old.


instead a letter                                                   6/29/95

of a poem
there is little
belittled
in telling a friend
what could be
instead of solitude

a grabbag of anecdotes
to share
to dramatize
a life painted in postage 
is lost forever to trust

words desanctified of holy loneliness
jokes aiming in common
at what is not enough to laugh
to oneself but to you
who can't quite read it - 
my off-rhythm cadence 
and left out letters

but finding some small hint of you or me in it
something reminding
keeps the blood warm between us.

Costello's

This is an undated poem I wrote about my dad back when he was living by himself, before assisted living and the Alzheimer units.  Looking back at my journals and the poems I printed on word processors and various computers over the years I notice a marked lack of consistent dating or dating at all.  But this had to have been during the brief heyday in JP of the Costello's Blues Jam, which would have made it somewhere between 1999 and 2000.  I wrote this the day after my dad and sister came along one Thursday night.  I had thought of reading this at Chuck's funeral last year but decided that, as true as it may be, it only tells part of my dad's story.


Costello's

We dance to these blues on Thursday nights
but Chuck says his awkward goodbyes beforehand
trying to see the other side of the moon.

He is uncomfortable in greeting his daughter;
and I and all we men 
seek comfort in dreams, imagination, and fantasy.
We fail to see the world as it is;
so we sing these songs
that have already been written for us.

We stand with sticks and axes in hand,
waiting to become ourselves
on someone else's time.

And as the hours grow,
these failings of our fathers and ourselves
become the moment's muse,
filling these songs with a familial familiarity.

Wet November Sunday

This is an undated and untitled poem which I wrote when I was working at Boston Secure Treatment.  The wet weather today made this poem seem strangely appropriate.

BST was a behaviour treatment program for DYS 'adjudicated' juveniles and we always had long goodbyes in our 'community meetings' whenever any staff or resident left.  If memory serves me, the year Jacob left would have been 1997.  He was a pain in the ass, but he was never a bullshitter and I always appreciated that about him. This is also one of the many, many poems and pieces I wrote in one way or another about Fall in New England.  I've tried to replicate the original formatting I used back when I was using my sisters Mac Plus.



                                                            the very next day
                                                         or the day after that

when the rains came
        wet November Sunday  
the smell of rotting leaves
        like old fireplaces
is everywhere
        covering the ground
like old insulation.

                                ~                ~               ~

                                                            we said goodbye.
                                                       the day
                                                            Jake said nothing.


when it turned back to 50 degrees
         sunny November Wednesday
the words around the circle
         like true falsities
lasted two hours
         weighting the day
like a photo of the future.


                              ~                 ~                ~         

Boost Lyenina

This is as far as I can remember the first proper poem I wrote.  I may have made some attempts in junior high for Mr. Killilea and Mrs. Crosby but that was a different endeavour.  If I recognize the type set correctly this was printed on our dot matrix printer off of our fairly primitive late 80's PC.  Its dated spring 91 which I suspect means April, my final month in high school.  I got the Bust of Lenin during our exchange trip to the Soviet Union the previous year.  The spelling of the title is of course the Russian pronunciation.

Boost Lyenina (Bust of Lenin)                                             Spring '91

On top of His bedraggled alarm clock
in His perch
the bald, bland eyes of Lenin
stare straight past me.

The same generic tie and suit,
immortalized in cheaply painted silver.
The same goatee,
protruding like a crazed intellectual.

And on His smooth, moon-like bald scalp
a trace of Russian chocolate and wax
melted on His birthday
in the town of His namesake.

His gaze is still past me as it was then
but it is not the same.
He has lost His edge.
He has become numbed,
      by staring at Woody Allen and Diane Keaton,
who fall in love on the wall across the room.