Category: Alpha Testing

I think these are pretty good, although I might yet tinker with it some more. In actual development environment environments, alpha testing should be done internally, not externally where customers are exposed to it. Nevertheless, here we are.

We were trying so hard

Therefore, every help to salvation bestowed upon believers, and blessedness itself, are entirely the gift of God, and yet in both the Lord testifies that he takes account of works, since to manifest the greatness of his love toward us, he thus highly honors not ourselves only, but the gifts, which he has bestowed upon us.
– John Calvin

Pictures piled from the pre-digital dump
ten moments within the same 30 seconds of opening a plastic toy, itself long missing
hoping to commemorate the milestone we’d arrived at – the eighth, or the nineth,
for the younger, or older boy? All forgotten.

No picture as good as what we can do with a smartphone now,
much less with the Canon EOS, even though it’s ten years old
and I never did get the lens I wanted.

The boys posing; my clicking on the right moment –
We were trying so hard. I think I’m getting wiser
but it’s just the fire dying – less fuel for the drive,
since I know now I’ll never succeed in so many things.

The things our parents wanted, what our church
wanted us to be, all the striving. All the wasted time.

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Bedeviled

I read a book on spiritual discipline
sitting in the cigar store
but I didn’t inhale.

Going home the pleasing aroma
was a whiff of tomorrow’s day-old
sacrificial stench. I showered,

practiced a song about
relationships that need to end,
proud of hitting the right strings,

Continue reading “Bedeviled” →
5

Celebrity

For J.H.

But you’re the diffident one
who has trouble looking me in the eye
and we sit out back of my house
you smoke and get your throat down a half-step
(use a capo; you’ll live longer I joke)
and you go out there night after night on the road.

I slip a hundred dollar bill in your case when you’re not looking
And wish I had made more of myself.

5

There is something I used to get

There is something I used to get
out of writing poems for no one, or not many
that I seem to get better out of writing
social media comments, replies
to great influencers

The feeling of bending something in the airwaves
the morse code static
a slight influence in the real world

but it’s not the same
not aspirational
it’s not occurring in a different, better room than the rest of my life.

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No Idea About My Past

I look at file dates and think
that was four years ago
and wonder what’s happening to my mind,
my perspective
what keeps happening
the accelerating rate
things keep changing

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Dancing about Architecture

“Writing about music is like dancing about architecture.”

– Martin Mull(?)

At first, we’re told, guttural cries
were what passed for expression.
Passed is not the right word, but professional
critics often rule out categories, deny
expression after the fact, and have tried,
from Mozart to Schoenberg, to call attention
to the various sins against form, the tension
between the old skins and new wine.

Schoenberg, for his part, had no use
for laws that came after the fact,
said they burst under special kinds
of tests — exceptions which make us loosen
rules disprove their need. He backed
off to be free of a tonal bind.

Continue reading “Dancing about Architecture” →
9

What I Learned By Not Thinking About It (draft 2, dVerse prompt)

It wasn’t that important to solve anyway,
which is good, because it doesn’t yield
to analysis or much of anything.

Even in physics we learned one can observe
vector or velocity, not both,
which leaves room for something. Call it God,
but not the god of flannel cutouts in cigar boxes,
musty Sundays, leading us to ever more thinking.

But it’s not nothing.
Or if it is, it’s the type of nothing
expressed in the tired old lines:

Have you seen my wife?

Is she about 5’2″, red haired, wearing a blue sweater?

That’s her! Have you seen her?

No, man, I haven’t.

7

A Few Calls About Death

My father at the breakfast table with Mom,
hanging up the phone: “Well, Dean is gone.”
My mother’s damn-you tears: how can you?

What else could he do? The time he called
to tell me about our friend who’d been
electrocuted, we were crossing the state line,
my wife and I, the young childless couple
heading back from vacation, and he said:
“There’s no good way to tell you this…”

Continue reading “A Few Calls About Death” →
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