Coffeeshop Writers Hosts Talented Newcomer! - Poem: Exquisite Machinery

Allison, across the street, is getting married. Can you see my tears falling on the keyboard cuz I wasn't invited? (Thank God!)

 Double-click for larger view of Allyson, who's holding up her train and trotting to the Limo. When you go down the Massers driveway, you have no choice but to trot. It's like one of those cliffs cars drive off in films noir.

Her dad has taken many a spill in the wintry weather on that driveway.

A blur of color is all we see.

I'm gonna read the instrux for my new Canon camera on how to take closeups. I'll put it in my bedtime reading pile, which is as tall as a small child.

Forgot to bring my camera to our Writers' Group but Martha brought her Samsung tablet.

Beatriz wasn't there

She's at Abington hospital getting chemo. Here's a cinquin I mailed her:

FOR THE BEE LOVER: A Cinquin  2-4-6-8-2

Ogre
Returneth. Our warriors
aim their arrows
straight. Explosions and cries abound.
All dead.

Excellent turnout today. I read an award-winning essay last nite which hopefully will change my life. It's about losing weight if you have diabetes. Written by John G. Rodwan Jr, read it here.

Read about John Rodman here.

Carly wrote two poems: Waiting for What is to Come, which had a series of gorgeous verbs in it. We all guessed what it was about. Most people thought it was a churling washing machine. I was glad the teacher didn't call on me cuz I hadn't the faintest idea.

Second poem was Against No One in Particular. I guess you could call it a metaphysical poem as it was about the meaning of things. The big picture. Who knows what thoughts burble inside this gal from Escondido, CA?

Martha wasted no time while she was passing out in the ER of Abington hospital. Her poem, ER, began "Anxious to come, anxious to go." For me, the poem really took off when she described the "hard gurney" she lay on - ouch! my aching back! - and the sounds of a baby crying while getting a shot.

When I questioned the veracity of this, newcomer Debra Dix - no relation to Dorothea - said that many ER patients have no health insurance so they use the ER as if it were their own private doctor.

Her poem "A Hospital Visitor" was about her 86-yo deceased mother who visited Marf at the hospital. For some reason, she was wagging her finger at Marf while letting her know everything would be all right. Her mom died on Mother's Day and Marf was in the hospital this Mother's Day. She had the very same doctor her mom did!

Allan Heller said he had a vision of his dad after his dad had died.

And me, I've had several visions, the last being of Lorraine Strazziere when I learned she died of cancer at 58. She visited me in my bedroom the same nite I learned of her death.

Life is metaphysical.

Here we are in our Football Huddle.

Linda finished up her short story "The Kiss that Killed." She's very good with nasty characters altho Linda, herself, hasn't a nasty bone in her body.

She's been working on the story at least a year, put it away, and then came out punching.... rewrote it and Allan, esp, thought it was the best version she'd done, with a great ending.

Look! It's even on a previous blog post!

Hear that, Lindy-Lou! Raise high the Roofbeams Carpenters, Raise High your Self Esteem. (Oy, if you knew all the rejections I've gotten lately....)

We love the names of her characters: Ulrike, Uncle Thimon, and that pore little orphan that miserable Ulrike's gotta take care of.



Alan wrote a wonderful rhyming poem "Quiet Time" - it might come at night, the morning, afternoon, invisible beneath the lights.

Reminded me of when I go to bed at night and just lie there, snug and content, letting my mind roam free and feeling I cheated death one more day.

Debra Dix looks so content you'd never know how busy she is. She's getting her doctorate in psychology and already has her master's. She found us through her Hatboro writers' group, attended by Linda, Allan and Beatriz.

We hope she'll come back. Just like I always want people to come back to my support group - New Directions - or attend our Bonfires.

Debra, no relation to Debra Paget one of my fave movie stars when I was a kid, takes her fiction writing very seriously. She attended many writers' groups in both Jersey and at a Princeton B&N.

She learned to make an outline and has finished the first draft of her fantasy/sci-fi novel for teens. I won't print the title since I don't want anyone plagiarizing it.

Did you watch the Frontline program on NY Times plagiarist Jayson Blair?

It was so disgusting I kept wanting to shut it off, but you know how it is. The man is a sociopath.

Deb's novel is extremely well-wrin and visual and kept us in suspense with this 'point of light' pitching itself in odd places. Her dialogue of teens cutting each other up was very realistic.

I'm at a restaurant here.

The group read my "Saving Sarah" about an Infectious Disease doctor at Einstein, a place I know so well, whose husband Lenny dies.

Later on, when I'm relaxing in my Quiet Place - probly on the back porch downing whiskey after whiskey like a real writer - I'll take a look at everyone's comments.

Wanna finish it up and submit it.

To submit, go to Goggle and click on Wiki, lit mags. You have 4,000 choices.


EXQUISITE PIECE OF MACHINERY

Wherever I go
I travel in an exquisite piece
of machinery, a roomy silver automobile
built just for me in a factory far from home.
Steering the machine is yet another machine,
equipped, not with pistons or radiators, but
with a thumping four-chambered heart protected
by a pericardium, a football helmet, of sorts. Atop this
bellowing machine is a clam soup of a brain, shining
like a star on a Christmas tree. Should they dig me up,
a newer version of Leakey’s ancient Lucy of Ethiopia,
and my innards are intact, they shall see one pear-shaped kidney
and two raisin-sized ones; and plastic contact lenses in my cataract-corrected eyes, all part of the greatest machinery of all, that heaving troublesome universe where I free float like a trapeze artist
for all eternity. Look up on an August night and watch me
tumble by.