I just realized

That's me in the back there
The baby in his mother's arms
Her wild hair but her recognizable
Face

She is foisting me into the row of
Her children, Larry in front, so much
Like me, or I guess I am so much like
Him, but so not like me and so
Himself

Like me.  He's objecting to something
And Michael the oldest brother so
Assured but so yeah, what do you say
And sweet Annette, there she is
In control, like she always needed to be
Sad

It is. Let's let that go, though let's be 
The hovering infant your mother
Wants to foist in line with the rest
But yeah, it makes me wonder as
I look at the line of my siblings
To see the lines of cousins, like us
Lined

It makes me feel the sad loss of 
Douglas, so big, so young, so him
Striped shirt and ready to become
Dead at 30 of a brain tumor with 
A child

I don't know even half of these
People and the half I do know
I've lost, lost somewhere in the 
Tensions of family. I'd like to
Though. 

Toast

Ive been thinking a lot about life these days

I'm intrigued by how the little things like eating toast

Seems to mean something

(Yeah I'm writing a poem)

But I am thinking a lot about

Life These days 

Losing weight

But I probably live in that Romantic world where things Matter.

I can understand Faust when you hear a song like That. But the best song ever, you know that I think, Isn't.

Bottle Collecting

 When I was a kid
My brothers and cousins
And other neighborhood
Children

Would wander along the
Roadside between our
Well-spaced farm
Houses

To collect bottles thrown
From passing cars to cover
For a night of sinful
Living

These were liquor bottles
You see, and in my small
Mormon town, drinking was
Forbidden

To most, but by the time
We were done collecting
(When being a teen was a
Thing

And collecting discarded
Booze bottles no longer
Held fascination and petulance
Ruled)

We had hundreds and hundreds
Of bottles lining the walls of
One of my cousin's old farm
Shacks

I don't recall ever once thinking
How strange it was that we had
So many, even in our small dry
Town

And we certainly never thought
Of drinking any of the few sips
Left sloshing against the thick
Glass

Occasionally, though, we unscrewed
The caps and sniffed the sweetness
Liquor wafted through the small
Shack

Last Temptation of Christ

 I've been reading Kazantzakis's The Last Temptation of Christ and was struck right from the start how well it could be adapted into a one season television series (unless, of course, the producers would want to carry on with the second coming in season two--which might be a hoot.)  Each chapter could be a complete episode, and would rely on the iconographic feel that the imagery in the book has.  I mean Greek iconography--the icons that the iconoclast worked so hard to destroy (but in the long run failed to.)  The visual design of the piece would be magnificently surreal, like those icons. I can see lots of flat lines of disciplines lined up in rows, warmed in golden light. Perhaps the irony would be that they would be dressed as "ragamuffins" as the translator so gleefully used the word, rather than all kitted up like Byzantine aristocracy.  Jesus's baptism strikes one as a perfect set piece from the book, with its Roshomonesque quality of no one quite certain what actually happened (nor hearing what the bird said).  I can see it playing out in several different versions on screen--one magnificent and trascendant--one gritty and realist--and one, perhaps, surreal.  No doubt it is a book that probably shouldn't be made into any thing else but the book it is, though.