What day is it again?*

I've been saying that a lot lately. Since the last weekend of April, I've been out of town or had obligations of some sort or had a guest every weekend. Me very, very tired.

And we won't talk about the state of my apartment or the fact that I neglected my new pet George for the first month we cohabited. He's a juvenile bearded dragon lizard and should have been handled every day. Alas, now he just scrambles away as fast as his little legs will run and then bristles and hisses his displeasure, when he's not actively trying to bite me.**

I'm not sure what this blog will turn into, but I've been thinking about doing a SciFi/Fantasy book review once a month, since I am a scifi geekstress. Mwahahahahha....

OK, I'm officially too tired to blog coherently, so I'm signing off. With a scifi poem from a couple years ago, written for Robert Lee Brewer's Poetic Asides Wednesday prompt series. I think it's from March 2013.

Let's Fly To The Moon

Let's take a trip among the stars.
Sleep through space and time.
Embrace the death we leave behind on Earth
while we breathe deep the gas
that gives us long life
and dislocated stars.

* This was written last Friday but not posted then because my laptop ran out of juice. 'Cuz I lost my power cord and had to buy a new, and very expensive!, cord from the Mother Ship, aka the nearest Apple store.

** I will eventually post pics of George, once I excise 70 G of photos off my laptop and have HD space available for backing up my phone again.

Vote for your favorite Olympic Poem!

Vote for your favorite Olympic Poem here on NPR. 

I'm not telling which one I voted for.

But I reserve the right to whine if mine didn't win.

Cuz I voted.

Hmm, maybe y'all should vote in November too.

Just saying.

Crap, has it been that long?

I so suck at this blogging thing.  And the other social media stuff.  Maybe I'm just being pulled in too many ways and need to cut back on my obligations.  Especially with my "mundane" job picking up steam and my Mom's health deteriorating like it has been in the past month.  She's about 7 hours away, if I speed and don't stop to pee.  So, a weekend trip isn't fun if I have just 4 days to make the trip. 

I have a college friend who recently contacted me and wants me to see her in the Durham/Chapel Hill area of NC, which is on the way.  If I make the trip next weekend, I plan on lunching or having dinner with her on the drive, either coming or going.  I haven't seen her since the year after graduation, in 1994.  Damn, that admission makes me feel old.

I was in San Francisco Bay area a week ago, at my Aunt's house about an hour north of the city.  I hadn't seen her in about a decade, since the last time she and my Dad had flown in from California to visit a great-aunt and attend a family gathering.  At least my Dad's side, anyway.  Since my parent's divorce, we kids have felt a bit like the black sheep of that side of the family.  Everyone loses something in a divorce.  And since we weren't especially close to any of the extended cousins -- how could we when we grew up in Alaska, the entire North American continent away from them? -- it was easy for us to just fade away. 

I attended a poetry workshop for 3.5 days of my 6 day trip to SF.  I learned a lot, got to see the SF symphony perform a lot of Latin songs from West Side Story, Rodeo, cha-cha-cha & mambo medleys where the crowd started dancing at their free concert in Delores Park.  I think I took a gazillion photos of the dancing -- from toddlers in the crow to practiced couples who looked ready for competition.  Gotta download some of those photos for the participants of the workshop.  And get my poems revised and sent back out to everyone else. 

If you get a chance to participate in an on-line workshop with Diane Frank, do it.  Or her annual workshop in her home in San Francisco.  It's a great experience.  Multi-cultural, no, not the word I'm looking for -- multi-disciplined, with the music and the sight-seeing and the poetry. 

Just ran out of time for this blog.  Gotta go work out now. 

I don't plan on

Posting many of my poems on this site, but wanted to share these two in light of last week's events.

I wrote the first poem as a response to Robert Lee Brewer's 2008 Poem a Day Challenge, day 5 prompt:  write about something you dread.  As Scully had just turned 10, I wrote about dreading "The day".

Decade

My ten-year-old Weimaraner,

the one whose leg may be broken,

who sports yet another set of stitches,

I fear the day I will have to hold her

muzzel close as she struggles

for air. I shy from the day I will see

her deep keel still, her eyes haze, her

tail cease to move, her paws lie still.

I avoid the thought of where she

will lay down for the last time, or

where I will spread her ashes, or upon

which mantle I will keep her urn. I look

into her yellow eyes and vow to spend

more time tossing the ball, scratching her

ears, rubbing her near hairless belly. I know

that I will forget that silent promise until the

next medical emergency will remind

me that she was 69 on her last birthday.

For Scully --

  June 27, 2012

I carry my grief like a gift,

tucked under my heart.

Encapsulated by my ribs,

absorbed like nutrition

with every heartbeat, the cells

of my body drink grief up.

It sweeps through cell

membranes, into nuclei.

Inserts itself into  my DNA,

becomes a permanent feature

in its permanent tomb.  My grief, a tiny 

reminder of the place you held in my life.