All hours wound,
the last one kills.

2007 Dodge Ram SRT10 "This truck could be more politically incorrect only if it ran on whale oil and panda tears. "

A Prairie Home Companion from American Public Media: "The Mexican migrants are living the lives of our ancestors and we know it. Lives of hard work, outside the mainstream, lives that would feel hopeless except for powerful family loyalty and faith. So we have some empathy for these dark mysterious figures in our midst."

What a howlee learned in Hawaii 2006.

My son sent me home with a couple
of hundred to deposit for his
dream of an apartment
with friends.

I returned to much more
however my dream is still
hiding around the corner.

The tarrot lady asked
me for a hug and
I smelled her hair.

The sarong brushed my ankles
keeping away mosquitoes.

The sun exposes and darkens
my skin.

Maw, Maw...How tall was that cliff
I jumped from....120 feet.

Hey Pa....wha?

H_O_W I_S I_T ?

Man in Space
by Billy Collins


All you have to do is listen to the way a man
sometimes talks to his wife at a table of people
and notice how intent he is on making his point
even though her lower lip is beginning to quiver,


and you will know why the women in science
fiction movies who inhabit a planet of their own
are not pictured making a salad or reading a magazine
when the men from earth arrive in their rocket,


why they are always standing in a semicircle
with their arms folded, their bare legs set apart,
their breasts protected by hard metal disks.

Uva uvam videndo varia fit -

A grape changes color in seeing another grape.

Things I learned in Gettysburg 7/4/2006

My father snores gently.
Some people can not understand Bill Buckner.
Some people want to be treated as adults.
War porn.
July in Pennsylvania is hot and
makes you pee rust.
To get out of the damn car.
Cousins work.
Best time to drive is at night
if you want to get somewhere.
Question the accepted view of everything.
Glad I went.

Eternity is a long time, especially towards the end.

Hug
by Ron Padgett

The older I get, the more I like hugging, When I was little the
people hugging me were much larger. In their grasp I was a rag
doll. In adolescence, my body was too tense to relax for a hug.
Later, after the loss of virginity-which was anything but a
loss-the extreme proximity of the other person, the smell of
hair, the warmth of the skin, the sound of breathing in the
dark-these were mysterious and delectable. This hug had
two primary components: the anticipation of sex and the plea-
sure of intimacy, which itself is a combination of trust and
affection. It was this latter combination that came to character-
ize the hugging I have experienced only in recent years, a hug-
ging that knows no distinctions of gender or age. When this
kind of hug is mutual, for a moment the world is perfect the
way it is, and the tears we shed for it are perfect too. I guess it
is an embrace.

A Prairie Home Companion from American Public Media:

"I locate the martini glasses, which had been used for fingerpaints, and I chill them, and I shake up the gin and vermouth in a pitcher of ice, and put on a Sinatra CD, and word gets around. The neighbors come over. They've been slaves to the brutal schedule of their children's social, educational, spiritual, recreational and therapeutic activities, with scarcely a free moment for themselves. 'How about it?' I say. 'Lock the little buggers in the laundry room and let's party. If they get put into foster care, so be it.' I pour us each a stiff drink and slap some beef on the grill, and we have ourselves a whee of a time. "

"It was on this day in 1893 that the verdict was announced in the trial of Lizzie Borden, who had been accused of murdering her father and stepmother with an ax. She was found not guilty."

Fathers day, 2006 or
What we believe but cannot prove.

Hours describe the circle
in one minute describe
the seconds in three
hundred sixty degrees.
Church equals marriage,
civil union for everyone else.
Horny is the flange of life.
Animals in commercials say what?
I hope to be alive to see what's next.
Twenty four years ago I yelped o'God
and twenty two ago I saw stars.
Now its me that wears purple.
Hey, Hey, Hey.

Off the Record
by Ronald Wallace

In the attic I find the notes
he kept in college
over forty years ago: Hooray
for Thanksgiving vacation! he wrote
in the margin of Psych 102.
And for a moment I can see him there,

feel the exuberance surge through
that odd cell of his body
where I am still
a secret code uncompleted, a piece
of DNA, some ancient star-stuff.
And then I find a recording of me

from 1948, when he was twenty-two
and I was three, and I can see,
from my perch up on his shoulders,
him stopping at the gaudy arcade,
plugging his lucky quarter into
the future where we'd always be.

Maybe imagination is just
a form of memory after all, locked
deep in the double helix of eternity.
Or maybe the past is but one more
phantasmagoric invention we use
to fool ourselves into someone else's shoes.

It is not my voice I want to hear
on memory's fading page, on imagination's disk.
It is my father's in the background
prompting me, doing his best
to stay off the record, his hushed
instructions vanishing in static."

May twenty fifth two thousand and sixth.

Change.

There are times change comes like water on stone

other times

it is found between the hammer and anvil.

What I have learned today - May twenty fourth two thousand six.

There are bugs that communicate by vibrating plant stems.

That the stress of commuting is hard to measure.

I am strong however it is not easy.

The Writer's Almanac from American Public Media:

"I told him that in Mexico the poor say
that when there's lightning the rich
think that God is taking their picture.
He laughed."

A Prairie Home Companion from American Public Media: "Young people are pessimistic enough these days without their elders complaining about things. Shut up. Life is pretty good when you grow up. You own your own car, you go where you like, and you sing along with the radio or talk to yourself or chat on your cell phone. You pull into the drive-up window and order the Oreo Blizzard. What's not to like? "

Sheldon VanAuken's book A Severe Mercy

'It is, I think, that we are all so alone in what lies deepest in our souls, so unable to find the words, and perhaps the courage to speak with unlocked hearts, that we don't know at all that it is the same with others.'

Unsolicited advice
is always
self serving.

The Writer's Almanac from American Public Media: "The word 'Easter' comes from an ancient pagan goddess worshipped by Anglo Saxons named Eostre. According to legend, Eostre once saved a bird whose wings had frozen during the winter by turning the bird into a rabbit. Because the rabbit had once been a bird, it could still lay eggs, and that rabbit became our Easter Bunny. "