Fruit For Thought…

“All our progress is an unfolding, like the vegetable bud, you have first an instinct, then an opinion, then a knowledge, as the plant has root, bud and fruit. Trust the instinct to the end, though you can render no reason.”

- Ralph Waldo Emerson (American Poet, Lecturer and Essayist, 1803-1882)

Joe Kennedy

 “THE SLOW TYRANNY OF MOONLIGHT”

The theme from an old western wafted through the big room like the faint smell of pancakes after a long winter of old potatoes and rusted hinges creaking in a frigid gloom of dusk

the sound welcome after the relentless drone of the machine the one keeping the swollen interior at constant sensation not too much not too little the tonal rudder of the thing unchanging an autistic pianist obsessed by the striking of the one key without pause

bifurcating my viscera gelding my ungendered gonads pissing on the sheen of my serenity

I wanted to find the source of that singular discord and defenestrate it the sonic frowst

of the mezzo-soprano whatever eating at the edges of my virtue the one I never had in the first place.

I wanted to throw an old jockstrap at it, order it some bad clams and make it suck em’ down.

I wanted to buy it a lifetime subscription to Readers Digest.

Oh, oh wait! That’s my punishment, that’s my beat-down, my Chinese water torture, it doesn’t have a brain, no awareness, no self-consciousness, no brain cells to rub together, it’s just a motor, a noise box, moving parts repeating its task, a sonic meditation I found irksome, yeah

that was it, I was irked, it should be the other way round, silent, quiet, still, but it isn’t. Shit.

Inside myself I tried bonding with it, breathing, accepting, caressing, crocheting.

My feet hurt. Suddenly I got that fat feeling like I just downed a gallon of ice cream and couldn’t move. A harbinger of doubt tickled my innards, and suddenly I was in the cut, surfing, robot seagulls moaning dizzily above, the twilight singing, sea creatures without eyes calling my name, I knew I was dead, and yet quite alive, kissing a sonic boom box of pure love, a popsicle of purity, an envelope mailed by a mime holding a seamless message inside.

- Joe Kennedy

(Joe writes & reads his witty poetry in Los Angeles)

© 2013

robert frost

“You have freedom when you’re easy in your harness.”

- Robert Frost

“if there are any heavens my mother will” by e. e. cummings

if there are any heavens my mother will (all by herself) have
one. It will not be a pansy heaven nor
a fragile heaven of lilies-of-the-valley but
it will be a heaven of blackred rosesmy father will be (deep like a rose
tall like a rose)standing near my

(swaying over her
silent)
with eyes which are really petals and see

nothing with the face of a poet really which
is a flower and not a face with
hands
which whisper
This is my beloved my

(suddenly in sunlight

he will bow,

& the whole garden will bow)

- e. e. cummings

anais nin

“If you do not breathe through writing, if you do not cry out in writing, or sing in writing, then don’t write, because our culture has no use for it. The role of a writer is not to say what we all can say, but what we are unable to say.”

- Anais Nin

juicy quote

“Chocolate’s okay, but I prefer a really intense fruit taste.

You know when a peach is absolutely perfect… it’s sublime.” 

- Kathy Mattea

 

Fruit For Thought…

 

“I wish I could write as mysterious as a cat.“
- Edgar Allan Poe

Still Life with (my cat Chet Baker) & fruit

Photo by L.K. Thayer

“so you want to be a writer” by Charles Bukowski

if it doesn’t come bursting out of you
in spite of everything,
don’t do it.
unless it comes unasked out of your
heart and your mind and your mouth
and your gut,
don’t do it.
if you have to sit for hours
staring at your computer screen
or hunched over your
typewriter
searching for words,
don’t do it.
if you’re doing it for money or
fame,
don’t do it.
if you’re doing it because you want
women in your bed,
don’t do it.
if you have to sit there and
rewrite it again and again,
don’t do it.
if it’s hard work just thinking about doing it,
don’t do it.
if you’re trying to write like somebody
else,
forget about it.
if you have to wait for it to roar out of
you,
then wait patiently.
if it never does roar out of you,
do something else.

if you first have to read it to your wife
or your girlfriend or your boyfriend
or your parents or to anybody at all,
you’re not ready.

don’t be like so many writers,
don’t be like so many thousands of
people who call themselves writers,
don’t be dull and boring and
pretentious, don’t be consumed with self-
love.
the libraries of the world have
yawned themselves to
sleep
over your kind.
don’t add to that.
don’t do it.
unless it comes out of
your soul like a rocket,
unless being still would
drive you to madness or
suicide or murder,
don’t do it.
unless the sun inside you is
burning your gut,
don’t do it.

when it is truly time,
and if you have been chosen,
it will do it by
itself and it will keep on doing it
until you die or it dies in you.

there is no other way.

and there never was.

- Charles Bukowski

Juicy Quote

My parents, and librarians along the way, taught me about the space between words; about the margins, where so many juicy moments of life and spirit and friendship could be found. In a library, you could find miracles and truth and you might find something that would make you laugh so hard that you get shushed, in the friendliest way.

-Anne Lamott

“Those lips that Love’s own hand did make” by William Shakespeare

Those lips that Love’s own hand did make
Breathed forth the sound that said “I hate”
To me that languished for her sake;
But when she saw my woeful state,
Straight in her heart did mercy come,
Chiding that tongue that ever sweet
Was used in giving gentle doom,
And taught it thus anew to greet:
“I hate” she altered with an end,
That followed it as gentle day
Doth follow night, who like a fiend
From heaven to hell is flown away.
“I hate” from hate away she threw,
And saved my life, saying “not you.”

- William Shakespeare