First Edition

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The Jacksons just posted some cool covered bridge pictures

A night at Rocketown
Laura Longon is great with a concert All That and a Bag of Chips
Here is a short story from Passenger Creek,  How Johnson Got Out of the War
Here is our friend and much published writer Seymour Shubin with The Bet
Every site needs a Love Directory so here is Love Songs and Poems
Okay another song/poem Darling Do You Love Me
Here is an excerpt of a poem by Janet Kuypers with a reading by Oz Hardwick. The poem is Escaping Every Cage
Here is book review of Witness to Myself
Elisha Porat returns with Waiting For His Return

Oh my goodness my Granny said Oh My goodness what have you done with Jake and Haystack and Elisha Porat and David Michael Jackson and Janet Kuypers. Have ya’ll gone completely crazy around here. You used to be such a quiet little place!
Who is Modern Music Nashville? They are a thin flow of water from a tiny spring somewhere.
Yeah we’re country boys  but we  also love Chicago poetry folks. These play button are contageous. Read and hear our own Janet Kuypers Made any Difference?
Ya know? Sometimes it’s The Trouble with Loving You but We’ll Make it Through Hard Times

Lately I have been publishing lyrics from my songs as poems. Lyrics tend to repeat phrases people ask for in search engines.  Some poems go viral. Some mp3 recordings tend to go a little viral too. Here is a new rhyming poem derived from our most  viral downloaded recording, Baby I Really Love and Need You. by Jake and Haystack
Here is A Poet’s Solstice by David Mitchell


Here is David Mitchell with Often in the Fog
Oh yes a Whiskey Poem
There are love poems and then there is Love Runs the World
Seymour Shubin brings us his first story at Artvilla, The Viewing
Phil Coyote returns with Greed or Need
It’s just me with Show Me
Hey somebody really cool showed up. We welcome Seymour Shubin with Joel. I think we have something here. Looking for more poems from Mr. Shubin, yesseree by cracky.
Enough with this droopy sloopy gooey sadness. No one is there anyway. I publish to the void and the bots. Don’t tap on the glass. There is no one out there. Only aliens reading this a million years from now in a distant galaxy.  Lyric is good to go  Too Late For Sleeping  Melody is pretty too. It’s a song about love, my alien friends . An emotion we humans had before we blew ourselves up. Off to the studio.
A poem called Earthen Jar.
12,000 files later I re-announce  the first poem  published on this site in 1996.. This poem owes a poetic debt to poets T S Eliot,”Do I dare to eat a peach” and to William Carlos Williams’ poem about the old lady eating the plums. He said :
They taste good to her
They taste good to her

Ah Summer Breeze always brings lovely wisdom I do not have. Here is Crazy Old Lady

I am the Grass Let Me Work Poem by Carl Sandburg

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Grass

PILE the bodies high at Austerlitz and Waterloo.
Shovel them under and let me work
I am the grass; I cover all.

And pile them high at Gettysburg
And pile them high at Ypres and Verdun.
Shovel them under and let me work.
Two years, ten years, and passengers ask the conductor:
What place is this?
Where are we now?

I am the grass.
Let me work.

POEMS DONE ON A LATE NIGHT by Carl Sandburg

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POEMS DONE ON A LATE NIGHT CAR

I. CHICKENS

I AM The Great White Way of the city:
When you ask what is my desire, I answer:
“Girls fresh as country wild flowers,
With young faces tired of the cows and barns,
Eager in their eyes as the dawn to find my mysteries,
Slender supple girls with shapely legs,
Lure in the arch of their little shoulders
And wisdom from the prairies to cry only softly at
the ashes of my mysteries.”

II. USED UP

Lines based on certain regrets that come with rumination
upon the painted faces of women on
North Clark Street, Chicago

Roses,
Red roses,
Crushed
In the rain and wind
Like mouths of women
Beaten by the fists of
Men using them.
O little roses
And broken leaves
And petal wisps:
You that so flung your crimson
To the sun
Only yesterday.

III. HOME

Here is a thing my heart wishes the world had more of:
I heard it in the air of one night when I listened
To a mother singing softly to a child restless and angry
in the darkness.

The Shadow Returns Poem

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The Shadow Returns

A stranger here
not knowing
it’s a shadow
appearing disappearing
a skittish movie reel
with shifting frames
apologizing endlessly
for trivialities.

Sometimes speaking
knowing that it’s
slightly out of sync
hoping to be heard
erratic traveler
never here nor there
a shadow from another place.
The light
is somewhere else.

Blinded by the Light of Your Eyes Poem by Susan Mandel

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Susan Mandel
(1)
Blinded by the light in your eyes
I cannot see the truth.
The darkness in your stare tells me
that dreams fade by the light of day.
Who do I see when I open my eyes?
Does it really even matter?

(2)
When you run to catch up with yourself
do you ever reach the end?
Exhaustion is bound to catch you before you do.
If the exhaustion doesn’t kill you, will you kill yourself?
Or can you not run quickly enough for even that.
Keep trying.
Swim.
Run.
Ride.
You’ll catch up eventually.
Just in time to see yourself die.
Never having found a finish line.