Loose Leaf Notes

1. Joe and I had a really good weekend that included dancing at Dogtown, reading poetry at Hahn Garden and helping our grandsons learn to ride bikes.

2. I remember my first kiss and the boy that kissed me but don’t remember how I got to the house where it happened or how I got home.

3. Best quote seen on Facebook this week: “If only we’d stop trying to be happy we’d have a pretty good time.”- Edith Wharton

4. I was invited to a Sunday afternoon poetry reading under the gazebo at the Hahn Horticulture Garden in Blacksburg. By way of introduction and because I saw several familiar faces in the audience from my days working at my friend’s Blacksburg bead shop throughout the ‘90s, I began my reading with a poem that I once taped to the bead shop cash register: Poet Cashier – It’s all I can do / not to / say “Buckle my Shoe” / after “One, two” / when I’m counting out the money…More HERE.

5. Sometimes you have to process a hurt by yourself because the other party involved can’t or won’t, and sometimes you process a hurt by yourself because it is your work and not others.

6. I recently wrote a poem that I refer to as my “Hey Jude” poem.  Paul McCartney said he wrote Hey Jude for John’s son Julian, but John always thought it was directed to him and Yoko, which makes perfect sense when you listen to the words.

7. A Hey Jude poem is one where I might say it’s about ‘this’ and you say it’s about ‘that,’ and you might be right.

8. Poems, like dreams, can have more than one meaning.

9. Worst quote of the week:  “We went back and forth, then we fell in love. He wrote me beautiful letters. And they are great letters. We fell in love.”  – Trump actually said this about Kim Jong Un

10. PBS just aired an in depth Frontline documentary called Trump’s Showdown, which one reviewer called “better than any thriller,” and summed it up by saying “Until the Mueller Report is finally released, tonight’s “Frontline” will have to serve as a kind of appetizer or CliffsNotes summation. Its story is terribly familiar and yet remains hard to believe.”  You can watch in online HERE. 

11. I apologize for rarely writing pretty poetry / or if I used my poetic license too freely / I’m sorry that my hands shake / when I fall in love or fall from grace / that my body is a dead weight / that won’t stay buried – Read Playing Dead Before the Ball in its entirety HERE.

12. I thought about calling this the “what’s not to like bike hike.”

13. Sorry if I Stepped on Your Toes HERE.

_____________Thirteen Thursday