matinée

i left
to be not quite alone
in the not quite dark

i didn’t bother to check what was offered
preferring to be in here
rather than in our drama out there

a luxury worth the price i suppose

so i get some Italiam neo-realist
and the crush of poverty
how even one stolen bicycle
can ruin a life

a matrer of perspective i suppose

yet the heart is still the heart
while not quite alone
in the not quite dark

***

somehow this post was turned back into the old draft, so i had to recreate it. interesting how one can forget what one wrote only an hour or so ago

***

As I was finishing the poem, I was reminded of the The Harvard Exit in Seattle, the moviehouse that introduced me to independent and foreign films. The first film I saw was My Dinner with Andre in 1981, which I did by the way have to see alone since there weren’t any of my high school friends as one might imagine who were interested.

I was sadden when it closed on June 7th, 2015 to be turned into a restaurant, bar, and office space, ending its 46-year run. The place, designed by architect Pierce A. Horrocks, was built in 1925 as a clubhouse for the Woman’s Century Club. The club was equal parts social and political, its founding related to the women’s suffrage movement. It became a movie theater in 1969, but the Woman’s Century Club still held its monthly meetings in the lobby.

Since this is Thursday, I thought a few picture for Norm’s Thursday Door Challenge would be appropriate [but I did not take the photographs].

A few pictures of the lobby would also be appropriate.

exuberant

Thursday Door Challenge

fish bros. air service

criticism

you’re a bull in my shop
believing yourself to be
companionately brutal

and each time
bone china flies

and each time
i am left
to sweep up my aisles
littered with shards of pellucid and greige

buoy line

Mundane Monday Challenge #124

blindsided

That my plan to watch the solar eclipse at Madras had hit a snag was obvious as soon as I heard the metallic clank and the car began its slow lurching to the side of Highway 97 about ten miles from the Columbia River Gorge.

Waiting for the tow truck to rescue me from the desert plateau, I leaned against the fender and debated whether this trip was the best way to blot out the emotional turmoil of the past week.

Coming to no conclusion on the matter, I killed the time by watching gusts whip the dust into a haze that blurred the distant wind turbines, the white blades spinning in their incessant loop.

 

these days in my mind

old school

stalemate

stuck in the day’s gridlock
a driver thinks of night’s dream
free sprinting through alleyways
that turn to dirt roads

a dirt road leading up to a house
that house
where the world collapsed onto a child
who would become a driver
stuck in the day’s gridlock

engulfed

Thursday Door Challenge

burglar bars

Mundane Monday Challenge #123

panic attack

i didn’t ask for this heavy wool coat on a summer day
yet here i am wearing it again

and no matter how i warp and buckle
contort arms and roil shoulders
the more it clings with the seeming ferocity of spite

it is like those early days
when the struggle to first tie the laces of my shoes
would bring me to the point of tears

confession

zag

exercise in futility

at the end of the day
i have tried that ritual of writing down
one sentence to sum up
the day

one sentence from the day
for the whole day

such as

a woman walked into the cafe and says it’s cold out there to no one in particular

or

a man ran for the bus cursing to himself

or

i found one shoe in the bathroom and one shoe in the kitchen

yet

one sentence will lead to another
with all the spaces in-between

the spinoff of the day