Last post loves Johnstown the most

[WDVE]

  Recently, in a large French city, a poster featuring a young, thin and tanned woman appeared in the window of a gym.  It said:


"THIS SUMMER,  DO YOU WANT TO BE A MERMAID OR A WHALE?"


A middle-aged woman, whose physical characteristics did not match those of the woman on the poster, responded publicly to the question posed by the gym.

To Whom It May Concern:

Whales are always surrounded by friends (dolphins, sea lions, curious humans).  They have an active sex life; they get pregnant and have adorable baby whales.  They have a wonderful time with dolphins -stuffing themselves with shrimp and other delicacies of the sea.  They play and swim in the oceans, seeing exotic places like Patagonia, the Barents Sea and the coral reefs of Polynesia.   Whales are excellent singers and have even recorded CDs.  They are incredible creatures and virtually have no predators other than humans.  They are loved, protected and admired by almost everyone in the world.

Mermaids don't exist.  If they did exist, they would be lining up outside the offices of psychoanalysts due to an identity crisis.  Fish or human?  Human or fish?  They can't have a sex life, because they kill the men they lure close to them.  Therefore, they can't experience the joys of motherhood.  They are purported to be exceedingly vain and capricious.  Not only that, who wants to be near a girl who smells like a fish store?

The choice is perfectly clear to me;  I want to be a whale.

P.S:   We are in an age when media puts into our heads the idea that only skinny people are beautiful, but I prefer to enjoy an ice cream with my kids, a good dinner with a man who still makes me shiver and a coffee with my friends.

 

With time, we gain weight, because we accumulate so much information and wisdom in our heads that, when there is no more room, it distributes out to the rest of our bodies.   So, we aren't heavy; we are enormously cultured, educated and happy.

 

 

Beginning today, when I look at my butt in the mirror, I will think:

 

"Good gosh!  Look how smart I am."

[new2pa]

good post

[WDVE]

Thanks new...

[lexiconic]

Marijuana       
            

Stoned by noon, I’d take the trail
that runs along the X River
in the State of Y, summer of ‘69,
crows’ black ruckus overhead.
I’d wade through the ferns’ sound
of vanishing to the almost-invisible ledge,
stark basin canted out to the southwest:
sheltered, good drainage,
full sun, remote, state land.
You could smell the blacker, foreign green
from a long way off when it rained,
incense-grade floral, the ripening spoils,
then pang of wood smoke,
antiseptic pitch and balsam,
scents cut like initials in a beech,
then cold that kills the world for a while,
puts it under, then wakes it up
again in spring when it’s still tired.
I woke from its anesthesia
wanting the tight buds of my loneliness
to swell and split, not die in waiting.
It was why I rushed through everything,
why I tore away at the perpetual gauze
between me and the stinging world,
its starlight and resins,
new muscle married to smoke and tar,
just wedding the world for a while.
About to divorce it, too,
to marry some other smoke and tar.

On snow shoes in falling snow,
we lugged peat, manure,
and greensand a mile up there.
alfalfa meal, spent hops.
The clones bronzed, hairy and sticky,
and a week before frost we’d slice
the dirt around them with a bread knife,
which gave the dope
a little extra turpentine.
Weed, reefer, smoke–
it was one of life’s perfumes.
Sometimes its flower opens
on a city street, gray petals,
phantom musk dispersing.

Sleeping out on the high ledges
on a bed of blueberries dwarfed
by wind and springy beneath the blankets,
we’d watch for meteors and talk till dawn,
gazing toward the pinnacle in the distance,
pyramid to the everlasting glory
of Never Enough, not far below us
in his tomb, asleep in the granite chill
with the bones of his faithful animals.

Could this be the pinnacle?
To be slumming back there
buoyant on the same old
wave just breaking,
now the wave of words, the liftoff?
I’m still cracking open the robin’s egg
to see the yellow heart, the glue.
A pinnacle is a fulcrum,
a scale. And now that it’s tipped,
I can look back through the ghost
of self-consciousness to its embryo,
first the tomboy,
then the chick in a deerskin skirt,
the first breaking of the spirit,
the heart’s deflowerment.

Caw, caw, a crow wants to peck
at the ember of the mind
as it was before it tasted
the dark meat of the world.
But I can call it back–
the match’s sulphur spurt,
its petals of carbon and tar,
a flash of mind, a memory:
how after each deflowerment,
I became the flower.

-Chase Twichell

[RobinQuillonsHair]

             

 

[WDVE]

A US Navy cruiser anchored in Mississippi for a week's shore leave.

The first evening, the ship's Captain received the following note from the wife of a politically connected wealthy factory owner:

"Dear Captain, Thursday will be my daughter Melinda's Debutante Ball. I would like you to send four well mannered, handsome, unmarried officers in their formal dress uniforms to attend the dance. They should arrive promptly at 8:00 PM prepared for an evening of polite Southern conversation. They should be excellent dancers, as they will be the escorts of lovely refined young ladies. One last point: No Jews Please."

At precisely 8:00 PM on Thursday, Melinda's mother heard a polite rap at the door which she opened to find, in full dress uniform, four handsome, smiling black officers.

Her mouth fell open, but pulling herself together, she stammered," There must be some mistake."

"No, Madam," said the first officer. "Captain Goldberg never makes mistakes."

[WDVE]

"I'm a little too belligerent. I cuss and swear at people. I yell at umpires and maybe I'm a little too tough at home sometimes. I don't sign as many autographs as I should and I haven't always been very good with writes."

"I like hitting fourth and I like the good batting average. But what I do everyday behind the plate is a lot more important because it touches so many more people and so many more aspects of the game."

Thurman Munson Yankees Catcher

[lexiconic]

Costanza Bonarelli

       A bust that looks just-kissed,
     from the blind intensity
of her gaze to the somewhat swollen
     parted lips, to the parting,
          above her rumpled chemise,
of two soft breasts his hands
     lifted from stone, Bernini’s

     lover was designed
   to please—to have and hold
in his own eyes as forever
   undone and to-be-done-to,
         a melting readiness.
Oh the inconstant Costanza,
     true-to-life but untrue!—

       whose drawing power, coiled
    as the heavy braid he pulled
behind her head, yet loose
    as the involving tendrils
        that tumbled to one side,
originated from
     within a designing woman.

       If either alone suffices
    (love or art, that is)
to lead a man to believe
     whole days can be best spent
          lost in a woman’s hair,
how could he not have wept
     at the upswept and downfallen

      tresses of one who was
    both singular ideal—
a thing he’d hewn from rock
     into his own landmark
          in portraiture, quintessence
of the sinuous baroque—
     and all too two-faced mistress?         

       That she was capable
   of deception—this was fine,
one guesses: a frisson
       at first, that she (the wife
          of his apprentice) gave
in private no resistance
     to a greater man’s assistance.

       But now the great man’s brother?
    His brother?  When the rumor
reached him, Bernini sent
     a razor-bearing servant
         to do what must be done.
He wasn’t going to kill her.
        No, but he’d leave a scar,

       a sort of Kilroy was here;
    he’d affix his stamp, he’d fix her
once and for all, for good—
    indeed, he’d have his thug
       underling slash her face,
her living flesh, with a tool
       not so unlike the one

       that he alone, the master,
had been skilled enough to wield,
      watching the marble yield
          to each sweet, painstaking stroke
     of chisel against cheek
until, so real, she fairly
      cried out for more.

- Mary Jo Salter

[RobinQuillonsHair]

    

Didya miss me?

[lexiconic]

Of course!

[lexiconic]

    Death Is Intended

    "On Feb. 6, 67 year old Guy Waterman, naturalist, outdoorsman, devoted husband ... decided to climb a New Hampshire mountain, lie down on the cold stones and die overnight of exposure.  'Death is intended,' he wrote." - The New York Times Book Review

    " ... the melancholy beauty of giving it all up."  Robert Hass

    Isn't that what Eskimos did when they were old,
    dragged themselves through a wilderness
    of ice and up some mountain?
    Then they could fall asleep forever,
    their dark eyes speckled with falling snow -
    not suicide exactly, but the opening
    of a door so death could enter.
    "Quit while you're ahead," my father told me
    as I was feeding quarters into slot machines.
    And that's what Waterman did, he quit
    before infirmity could catch him, or other afflictions
    whose breath he could already smell.
    But I wanted more: a waterfall of coins
    spilt on my lap, the raw, electric charge
    of money.  I came away with nothing;
    but I still want more, if only more chapters
    in the family book I'm a part of: I want
    to read all the unfolding stories, each child
    a mystery only time can solve.
    Was it bravery or cowardice what Waterman did,
    or are those simply two sides of a coin,
    like the coin some casual God might flip,
    deciding who would live or die that day?
    I'd rather flip the coin myself, but not at 67.
    And not quite yet at 70, as spring
    streams in over our suburban hills, enflaming
    even the white New Hampshire mountains.

- Linda Pastan

[WDVE]

Good days, bad days, but never a boring day on this job.  You do what God has called you to do.  You show up, you put one foot in front
of the other, and you do your job, which is a mystery and a surprise.  You have no idea, when you get in that rig, what God is calling you
to.  But he needs you, so keep going.  Keep supporting each other. Be kind to each other. Love each other.  Work together.  You love the
job. We all do.  What a blessing that is.” 


These are words spoken by Father Mychal Judge on September 10, 2001, less than 24 hours before he died, as he rededicated the
quarters of Ladder 42 in the Bronx.

[lexiconic]

Clenched Soul

We have lost even this twilight.
No one saw us this evening hand in hand
while the blue night dropped on the world.

I have seen from my window
the fiesta of sunset in the distant mountain tops.

Sometimes a piece of sun
burned like a coin in my hand.

I remembered you with my soul clenched
in that sadness of mine that you know.

Where were you then?
Who else was there?
Saying what?
Why will the whole of love come on me suddenly
when I am sad and feel you are far away?

The book fell that always closed at twilight
and my blue sweater rolled like a hurt dog at my feet.

Always, always you recede through the evenings
toward the twilight erasing statues.

-Pablo Neruda

[RobinQuillonsHair]

 

[lexiconic]

All you goofy geeks
with your stupid, silly games
ruined this forum