Category Archives: Shoebox

all the odds and ends… scraps of scribbles and digressions, unfinished, almost forgotten and without a cycle to belong

Providence, lost

July 28, 2021 daveo Leave a comment

Sunday, Providence
grey like last week
with my bargain matinee cough syrup nod
candy coated

hold onto my thick head
next wave goes to mars
next even further
watch the clothes spin
in their fluff and dried
nebulae

i’ve tried it all on bended knees
but i’ll just think here and sit about
lost months and misplaced friends
haggard days and ice cream cones

i’ll stand here
holding nothing
try to think
how i got here
then figure where i am

i’ll stand a shady place
counting nickels

and happenstance
empty out my pockets
on the ground
you can’t trade lint
for bread and cheese

“it’s cloudier now than
its been for years”

i’ve spent days moving quickly
years dreaming loosely
and hours watching patiently
and weeks muddling and fidgeting

for the moment that is now
elsewhere
and sometime long before

From a lost and found journal) + for John Low on the couch { who says, “Evocative. Took me back. Rich, forlorn, our Providence, your Providence”
photo accompanying is desk at Koizumi Yakumo / Lafcadio Hearn’s home/museum in Matsue – there’s a pretty good chance I am him reincarnated

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Post'd (cards + letters), Shoebox

Postal wormholes to elsewhere #haiku

July 18, 2021 daveo Leave a comment

Bend paper to find
Shortest distance between points
Or apply a stamp

{for Amber}

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Shoebox

Haiku – unconfidential kokoro postcard (variations)

October 27, 2020 daveo 2 Comments

Often, a poem comes out fully-formed, fiddling and remixing only dulls the knife, sometimes however, variations are eager to come out to shine light in another corner: Lonely, Joyful, Melancholy, Mysterious.

In this case, (my) familiar themes of un-confidential love letters on postcards mailed from foreign places and glanced by – or maybe sadly not glanced – by personnel along the way who (may) add their pathos to the journey.

One version of this (do you care to guess which?) will go on the reverse of the post box at Farmer Mac’s goat farm – Perhaps another painting will follow… and then a postcard a photograph of the painting mailed to the post box and so on. Always be remixing.

No pardons for redundancies, variations on a theme require riffs on the same blues.

Do you care to posit which your prefer?

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Shoebox

Annotations: Regarding Japanese-inspired Poetry

Image October 13, 2020 daveo Leave a comment

Consider the words
Write them once, only –
In a single inky sweep
On tactile paper
Then add a flower
Close the book
For now

&/or do none of the above

(from summer 2018 Moleskine accordion notebook “when everything changed”)

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Shoebox

Poem: post office closed (again)

Image September 25, 2020 daveo Leave a comment

Post office closed
(again)
You’ll need another
day to know
you are loved
by a lost poet
without a watch

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Shoebox

Poem: Earliest Recollections (Lansing, MI, 1973 with tornado)

June 29, 2020 daveo Leave a comment

Lansing Michigan, 1973
eating macaroni & cheese
in a damp basement
while adults whispered
windows shivered
radio crackled

and i wondered why
the tornado was coming

and then my memory began

Note:

this is brother Bob’s (straight ahead) birthday March 1973 so i (front right) was 2.5 years old / for years i recalled this photo somehow and then going through my dear late Mom’s slides, found this and *knew it* instantly / that screened in porch, the sun, and everything.

Aside:

this memory was described elsewhere in a riff…

“A brief stint in Lansing Michigan is where I remember my first thoughts, hunkered in the basement easting macaroni and cheese during a tornado, sitting in a big screened-in porch eating birthday cake with my glasses on.”

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Shoebox

Former Child Soldiers #poem

February 16, 2020 daveo Leave a comment

The former child soldiers
Are now working in PR
Trying to convince foreigners
To come here anytime

(Sri Lanka, 2017)

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Shoebox

Numbers Station Sending Alert for Action

January 30, 2020 daveo Leave a comment

From Prague to Irkutsk to Montevideo, shortwave radios broadcast voices, numbers and patterns. Origins (generally) unknown beyond speculators and bureaucratic engineers from ousted fiefdoms gone stale.

They found no benefit or public belief for revealing secrets, so no one did… Speculations generally drift towards messages to embedded agents of nefarious organizations.

Simply put, clandestine instructions need sending.

However the keys to transmitters were lost, floppy disks written in COBOL became unavailable, and handlers dead or confused – hence a new system was needed.

As such, the Bilderburgers got the Bohemian Grove on a conference call, patched in the Illuminati from a bunker in Cuba and raised the spectre of the global transmission – a single word – to begin The Operations.

The line was silent for a moment, then a proper but thin and reedy voice asked, “but tell me then, how can we release that one word in a manner that everyone will read it?”

To which another dis-intermediated voice confidently said, “I have just the right idea.” #covfefe

Related: ird059-conet-project-booklet (pdf)

Shoebox