But I can stand,
I reason to myself, and
the memory is equally clear
standing up to shave, or speak.
The mundane reality of the afterworld,
of life after the thing that happened.

When I was in the hospital I dreamed simply
of walking, waking to find myself on fire
with pain, tied down with tubes.

I wake needing to urinate.
I stumble to the bathroom
before realizing the mundane reality.

I feel that whatever progress I’ve made from a writer of sophomoric poems about dead relatives to a finished, objective writer of incomprehensible poems about dead relatives is due to that bunch. I joined in the late ’90s, back in the dark ages when a mailing list was cutting edge. As I recall, I found it after a Compuserve poetry forum I’d been on fell apart.

The two times I’ve been really published (once in print, once on the web) were due to tips (and perhaps behind-the-scenes scenanigans) from fellow members.

It ended not with a bang but a whimper. We moderators woke up one day and realized that no one had posted for a couple of months.

This is a blog, in part, about how technology and writing intersect, about the possibilities for one to influence the other. Sadly, I think as technology changes, the people it leaves behind are like the patrons at a declining restaurant. And a mailing list is really passé. I wish we’d kept up with the times.

I feel very sad about the friends I’ve made and lost along the way at Zeugma. The original two moderators at Zeugma, whose names I can’t even remember, but who took a chance on someone who wrote some really lousy poems in an application (and yes, the application always really meant something – to the end, our admission rate was no more than 75% at best, or worst, depending on how you saw it.)

Even Craig Chaffin, who pissed me off time and again with critiques. Especially Erin Noteboom-Bow. I hope she does vanity searches sometimes and finds this. She wrote in a dedication to me that I was “a better poet than I know,” and I have clung to that hope like a raft – more than she knows. Scott Murphy, who wrote (and hopefully still writes) poems like fine dry martinis.

Read some of our best works here at this ungainly URL:

https://sites.google.com/a/zpoems.net/www/zeugmapoets

And especially Holly Pettit and Page Nelson, my fellow moderators to what looks like the end, unless someone else takes it up. I mean it when I say I want to keep in touch, to read what you write. And Holly, I still want that copy of your book. I’ll even pay for it. Please?

On the other hand, I feel very glad to have met new friends along the way – the greatest crop of them so far at http://www.dversepoets.com – I won’t start naming names because I’ll leave someone out (as I did with the Zeugma list, I’m sure.

He appears, inexplicably,
on a panel talking about the death of JFK,
the day after, late in life, surely years after
he wrote The Deepest Dream.

He doesn’t say much. Unlike his son,
not given the answers, he doesn’t
wind on like the others, doesn’t speak at all
until late in the program, and then
speaks mainly of the past.
But then later, coming to this:

Whoever did this…
defeated his own end more completely
than one can say.

But then, he is still speaking
of the past, of Brutus and Cassius,
of Lincoln. Perhaps thinking
of the early church.

The camera pans the eminent men:
the historian
the jurist
the professor
the worldly philosopher
and seems as dazed as they seem
in the wake of the few lucid words
that anyone can say.

A bus rumbles by each day
on the last leg of a crosstown journey
stops before getting to Walgreens
a man picks up his backpack
which rested against the sign.

written in response to this here dVerse prompt.

I wish I could say I thought of this, but you can’t make this sort of thing up.

A handwritten note I found
that had nothing to do with me
and wasn’t particularly wrenching
or well-enjambed

still startled me
because the handwriting,
the blue lines and charcoal grey
reminded me of days in school
when you would write to me
thinking about me instead of
world geography.

The faint smell of your wrists
and the sweetness of paper itself
I imagine it in
a handwritten note I found
that had nothing to do with me.

My wife and I exchanged letters
by the mail across hundreds of miles
before we were married, and still
write things in cards three times
a year – but mostly we text, and
keep our grocery list synched.
She sends me an emoticon kiss.

It’s love like I hope you have
with your husband now.
I believe it in
a handwritten note I found
that had nothing to do with me.

Somewhat after the style of Leonard Cohen; Tedious explanation of what I’m up to after the cut.

So the reality is that inspiration struck, as it often must, from two different vectors – I found some guitar tab online, and the young lady who wrote it down didn’t put it in one of the tab softwares, or type it out in a monospaced font, which takes forever; she wrote it on notebook paper and scanned it. As a .tif! So seeing this on my computer screen reminded me of a sweet old high school girlfriend, and the second source of inspiration was Mary’s dVerse prompt about Leonard Cohen. Now, I don’t know that I did much good trying to write as Leonard Cohen, but one thing common to reading song lyrics is a certain awkwardness that comes if you read lyrics and don’t know the melody.

And I can do awkward. And nostalgia, and relationships both long-term and failed. So all that seemed to come together. Think of this as a song without a melody.

And of course I’ve been dreaming about the software. The TV show I saw last night, and how it would relate to the software. The book I read, and how the characters would deal with the software. The fact that I need to go to the bathroom and yet don’t want to get out of the warm bed and into the cold bathroom, and how this fact would be entered in the software…

It doesn’t have to be Shakespeare, but it does have to be in Monday, buddy.
Try writing a poem about writing a poem*
and that ever-helpful
Just write what you know.

*making this a poem about writing a poem about writing a poem?