I mean like Homer, Milton, the Beowulf poet, Poe, Coleridge, all those folks telling stories with verse.  Now the lyric is King:  elucidating ever more subtle emotional states while less and less actually happens.  I’m not criticizing the lyric.  I started out writing them, and still do.  It wasn’t until I started following story, though, that I started having fun.  Maybe if we poets started telling stories again, we’d pick up a bigger following.

I’ve been bitten by the narrative bug, and that’s the reason I haven’t posted lately.  Two bugs, actually:  the finish-up bug and the start bug.  I’ve finally finished my collection of narratives set in a small town in Ohio in the present time.  It’s been accepted by TJMF Publishing, and I owe them a second set of galley proofs.  Meantime, the Start bug has bitten me and filled me with a story from the same part of the world, but in the early 1900s. 

The thing about narratives is that they’re connected.  Connection is the heart of narration.  And since they’re connected — or should be — any piece I hacked out and posted here would be dripping blood, nerves, and sinew.  Maybe I’ll post both books if the hard copies don’t sell, but then I’ll have to post them backwards, last poem first, so that they read correctly on the screen.

But do you want to read two hundred pages of poetic vignettes? Each book will be about a hundred pages long.  My readers on PoetryCircle generally like the poems, but they’ve only seen the books being built, and not read one straight through.

Maybe there really is still a place for printed paper.

The kids in the alternative school
are mad because Bill the Director
won’t let them
explore storm sewers,

so they write BITE ME, SHUT UP,
and DIE BILL on the walls
in colored chalk, and draw Bill
with a bullet hole in his head.

“Make the blood look real,”
one of them says.

Then a teacher laughs, “Hey
you want a sewer, we could
send you back to Main Campus.”

So the bullet hole gets
covered by a hat, DIE BILL
becomes a green cat, someone
hides BITE ME in flowers,

and SHUT UP becomes a big
fat peach in which nestles the moon
holding in her arms the sun.

says she’s under surveillance.
It could be true.

She’s been poking around
in government records

for her book about
nuclear contamination

and people dying in
the small towns Back East

where the factories sit.
Hell, I’d be

disappointed in any
government that didn’t

at least check her out.
“Is she batshit crazy?”

my friends out here ask.
We have a lot of

local experience with
batshit crazy:

black helicopter watchers
chemtrail fearers

Federal Reserve haters
alien abductees. 

It’s a valid question
but it doesn’t matter:

even paranoids
have enemies.

She won’t talk
on the phone anymore.

She thinks anyone
who approaches her

after her public talks
is a “plant.”

I think she’s doing
their work for them

if indeed they’re doing
any work at all.

She hangs up the phone
and won’t answer my letters.

So I’m stuck
putting it in a poem

as I did with my parents
my church, my country

ever since I could write.

By the side of the road
picking up discarded

time.  Careful you don’t
become a discard yourself

but the damn stuff does
pile up.  Life

goes grey with it.
You gotta do something

with the blank faces
people toss off

as they go by.
Gotta salvage the fear

anger, love behind them.
Assemble the poems, then.

Folks will call you clever.
That’s all right.

Maybe they’ll take one
home.

Tiger tonight
growls among the mountains.

The bruja  who became a cat
to cross a road,
the duende who sprouts from mesquite black,
they hear it too.

They and I,
greedy for the sound.

It’s all too much,
this blurring by,
far past even her craziest
girlhood speculations
on the porch swing,
radio talking baseball
to the summer day.

Now forgotten how
she gave up and let the times
ratchet on ahead

leaving her in
the eternal conversation
of grass and clouds

wandering.

white tree
blue sky
black crow

noisy crow

It’s been
how many
decades since
I felt lonely –
three?
four?

Closer
to four.

Maybe
it’s having
those
dead people
on the
other
side of
reality
tapping
the glass.

http://www.condron.us

is a good place to go to surf blogs.  They’re a good place to register with, too.  They keep your blog on the roll for a long time.  I got a couple of hits every now and then without having to re-register every time I put up a new post.  Also, they’re free.

If you want a good bunch of hits, register your blog with

http://alphainventions.com

but you won’t stay on their roll very long.   Also, they want you to pay for a good spot on their roll, which would be okay, but I asked them about how to stop the autopay once it gets started, and they never wrote back.  I got a thousand hits from them in one day, and I’d like to try them out for a month or so, but I don’t want to get stuck paying month after month with no clear way to cancel. 

If you know of any other blog surfers, I’d like to hear.