February 24 Sheffer Crossword Puzzle Poem Draft

We pass samples of divinity and swirled fudge with demi-
tasse spoons beside the beach - to pay the rent our biz.
Where the sea exhibit used to be an Asian woman sews.
We like it here where salty sand and sun are our providers.
We've found what we believe and stay in sync and link
to what we love. Like sand dollars, we haven't any
need for what's away from shore. Sip your orange
drink honey, we're listening to Haydn.
Do you think you smite us with ahem?
Go sit beneath the shade, rub in your aloe.
You're in the shallows and there's nothing else to say


---

What I'm wondering this morning is if more parents have sent their children to private schools over the past 15 years or if children have as it were lost their fricking minds over this time? Sadly I think that lots of kids are on the brink of having lost the ability to think or do anything interior at all without someone riding them - I'm talking about middle schoolers who I've always felt would be happier and more productive on twelve hour a day wilderness work crews than in school. Can you believe I've written that someone can ride a child into experiencing an inner life? That won't work! But what it will do is quiet the exterior, separate the ants from one another, stop the constant outer whoosh outer babble outer give and take and take and take that dominates their daily lives. Or not. Where I am teaching now it's a delight to walk around the room and talk to kids from all over the world, this generation, this kid, from somewhere hundreds to thousands of miles away. This is part of the problem. How to reach kids whose grasp of the English language is tentative - and many who've had little education in that far off place so that even if our language were the same they'd be behind. And how is it tjat some teachers blow off classroom management entirely in a room where people need to know how big the playpen is? And where it isn't? A kid yesterday who'd been suspended for weeks came back - I remembered him from last year when he'd been in school a day or two at a time between suspensions. He did well in that other idyllic now I see classroom where the teacher sat beside him. Yesterday he left the room several times - SEVERAL TIMES - and the teacher at her computer didn't notice. Her one disciplinary gesture was to deny him a writing implement. "Didn't you prepare for school?" or "Why is it you didn't prepare to be in class?" OBVIOUSLY the kid has a knack for chaos - give him a pen, and don't let him leave the room!

2/3/09 Sheffer Crossword Puzzle Poem Draft
A LOVE POEM

your fingers patter at your cell
Chicken Little to my hen
Yo Yo to my Yeon-Hee oboe
I'm dizzy as a head cold
no noz me with more olla
oh yeah, even cards or odd
crinoline slip do si does not tit
for t'will not buy you bus
fare, Kia for your Audi
I'd trick to buy your gas
offer peony and stock
valentine box a heart bleed
my need a greased pig, eel
uber moon for you in bad
or beefsteak.

Paul Klee "Mask of Fear"

well, it doesn't come in on little cat feet does it?

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Sheffer Crossword Puzzle Poem Draft 9/30/08, First Go

When even peacocks dress in drab

come in from damp

office days in a daze no craze for debs

to don what they do not have. Aloe,

as they say on phones in India. Ill

winds blow or was that trickle down?

Nero never learned to fiddle, Rome

burned. Ideas too and passions, our

urge to act up or whine like nine

year olds when you don't send me

where we wanted to go in our Volvos.

Oh we're drab enough now that hope

has fallen in the dunning ditch and

which of us takes the blame? Have

we grown this tame, heads hung low

and laughing all at once as though

the curtain doesn't billow for me

and you. Too. Rub our heads for luck

till we go bald. Trim our sails

for diapers. Should have kept the van

fantan man. TV shows for true

but we are here or were and near

to seeing or we will before we set.

And yet.

Word Scrimmage Word Poem Draft (oh how the mighty have fallen)

Spray Shout! across the micropile bath towels
keeper of the keys in the laundry room because
you want to be, your ankle throbbing, a sprain
that eases as the stains do, nice and evenly
as your temperment you share with your
placid father, the one you threw the forks at
trying to rile him as your mother taught you.

---

Did that need an amen? ahem, to continue:

Sheffer Crossword Puzzle 9/12 Poem Draft

Today in Sports

Go panthers! devilrays! cowbows! hawks!
swell in your padded suits until you ebb
inevitable as all that flows. You must avail
yourself of everything you can, yes sir,
for unto you will come the day when yea
you walk through the valley, no Delta
to carry you across and safe. No Clooney
with tongue in cheek could save Lenore,
your only hope for praise to save
your name for Google search. No Tao
you walk will lead you from an Usher.
Do it now for one day what you lack
trumps what it doesn't take swami
to remind you will ensue and freeze
what's left. Oh you can build a baffle,
but we all lose the raffle, aren't risen.
We're flat crackers, bulger wafers
and even wide receivers get stomped
as if I know a football thing dear ref.
So as you trade your Prius for Mini
and hang your bike in your garage
I'll take your photo like George Eastman,
stay at the Heathman, but we're timed
and primed to go not come for as we are
will alter crack and dribble like an egg
in cardboard cradle, wear like agate,
slink through dumpsters like the rats
we mostly are as sad as Norma Rae
though once again the Tour de France has Lance.

I'll get to the point soon enough, Tim,
so get your fingers off your Apple
Davy Crockett downed in Alamo
John Lennon offed in front of Ono
your eyes glazed like I'm a rerun
you naked but no marble David
all this as cunning as quicksand
not what we wanted when we arose
and though there's sun there's ursa,
dippers falling through star forests
you can't see through your stink eye
hair glint tribute to bleaching agents
I'm mean, you say, my tongue is acid
you one unsung hung sharpshooter
oh feet oh legs oh thighs of clay
finger flash across yon abacus
and all the world at bay. Say
what you must say, the gander
and the goose, and I will stare
my stare. We've passed our prime
and tit for tat for far too little time

Sheffer Crossword Puzzle Poem Draft


How far we've come when we can char
our ribs on Wolf stoves' stainless with ado
outdoors with cedar wood from Taos.
But here it is again, our rain, my love,
the rhodies saved and we will nip
no kiwi vine today. Forward up an urge
we'll climb a dryer day. Silicon in tubes
we rubes aplay while out the window ivy
climbs clefted bark the cedar sighs
I dream through catalogs as if to buy
a Morris chair, pillowed bed, Sundance
dainty on a thong, oh me I play my part,
hooked wool rugs and Grecian urns
sugar plums to dance and fill the pie charts
it's damp I'm dumb I've put away the aloe
don rubber gloves, downstairs I scrub off
mold, afix new tiles, at ten I'll break for tea.

Sheffer Crossword 7/28, a Poem Draft

Scratch a mosquito bite, endure perpetual scab
like lion bears unhappy and pacing at the zoo
or mildew toughened and renewed through suds
for all you believe cannot come through by logo
what you swallow will return as Rorschach ink
vast and intertwined as aftermaths in Asia
and you redfaced your fisted pork chop
UHaul trailer stalled in Murfreesboro, gas cap
popped and gone however scoured the area
as we sit down and bow before our porridge
kingdom for a crescent wrench a dime a diva
pitch hum annunciation your wristwatch Zulus
believe in progress accomplish three times nil
flex will and flesh your solar plexus achy
pack portmanteau deplane in Lisbon, Portugal
itch for vinho verde lamprey sausage trout
follow what you yearn for earn your paunch
cry baby cry still leap dolphins after porpoise
so you slip you lift again and try another role
ancient churches crumbled to the apse
your lapses unrepented unexumed you fumed
so what, so why not curry what you need?

Sheffer 6/23 Puzzle

Life loops forward from the womb
odd isn't it to have emerged awed
out of that dark Eden to rise and ebb
as we all do, alas, all that we erect
falls away no matter how jealously
we guard, hate, cordon off, bargain.
It is summer with the heat turned
high sky gray trees darkening their
green leaves and shaking them at
every passing car. How far we have
driven past our welcome. We say
we'll never again and then repeat.
Coyotes stare from Arboretum
azalea shade, crows litter alleyways
beside dumpsters, asphalt fills
potholes and we are filled with mad
anxiety and sad seedless watermelon.
What have we done to chickens' DNA?
We wallow at the shrink's as peaks
lose glacial weight. What we knew
about the water cycle cannot comfort
now it's wrong. So much here to rile
kiwi whips tendrils toward dogwood
all vines lasso, pull, muzzle into and
through relentless and blind as moles.

Sheffer 6/18

My friend gyrated on the floor in front of the amp
I danced and guarded her as well as I was able
cables dangling from the ceiling not even a mat --
yoga and sushi the future, exotic food meant poi
proudly countercultural, dorm rooms never neat,
lived on wheat sprouts, undercooked lima beans,
bass pounding through my pelvis as if to gain
anything but orgasm made nonsense in that arena
(college cafeteria) and grass made me Glenda
everyone Glenda the Good, our arms gone wands
we blessed everyone everything, high as an alp
our power pulsing through the speakers, Tiny
Dancer, my friend upright and thrashing, the boy
with waistlength hair pulling me closer, it all
mattered and none of it mattered but matter
moving colliding like remnants of the Big Bang
in deep space grandiose colossal even my ear
Venus size widening ranging as if just to hear
were its tiniest ability as it licked up, sucked in
decibels as if sound was all you can eat spaghetti.