Barry Graham's Blog, page 13

A story of Rape or something else

It was the summer of 2004. I was living in East Tennessee, in a house on the edge of woods, at the halfway point on a mile between a mental hospital and a sewage plant.
Someone knocked on my door, and I knew it had to be trouble. I wasn’t expecting anyone, it was after midnight, and not many people knew where I lived.


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Haiku

zazen together, one breath
4000 miles but
no distance between us

Fleeing the Crime Scene

It was a Saturday night in Glasgow, Scotland. Clarendon Street is at the bottom end of the Maryhill area, so residents in denial would say they lived in Woodside. It was 1977, so I was 11 years old. I was walking past a block of flats, and I heard something that made me open the entry door and look into the stairwell.

Three or four young men had another man in a corner, and they were kicking him and slashing at him with knives.

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Fleeing the crime scene: witnessing violence, murder, & donald trump

It was a Saturday night in Glasgow. Clarendon Street is at the bottom end of the Maryhill area, so residents in denial would say they lived in Woodside. It was 1977, so I was 11 years old. I was walking past a block of flats, and I heard something that made me open the entry door and look into the stairwell.

Three or four young men had another man in a corner, and they were kicking him and slashing at him with knives.

They didn’t seem to realise I was there, but when I ran out of the building,...

Orthography

Bart Lessard wrote: "I came up with a sentence to demonstrate how bizarre English language orthography truly is, if people in the south say the same about Gaelic: With a rough sough like dough in a slough, the plough cuts through the trough, though tough."

Poem: The Speed of Light

She is getting in bed when she realises she is out
of the half-and-half she takes in her morning coffee.
He is still dressed. He tells her he’ll walk to the market
and get some for her.

The market is two blocks from their apartment.
As he walks, he looks up and sees stars

that have not existed since before he was born.
They did not know their light would travel so far.

He finds the half-and-half, selects two cartons,
stands in line at the checkout. Light of dead
stars, her asleep now in their home. Cof...

We call this friday good

Easter 2007, St. Matthew's homeless shelter, Chattanooga, TN: Larry, me, Greg, Brother Ron Fender Twelve years ago, when I spent Easter with my friend the late Brother Ron Fender, I recited this from T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets:

The wounded surgeon plies the steel
That questions the distempered part;
Beneath the bleeding hands we feel
The sharp compassion of the healer’s art
Resolving the enigma of the fever chart.

Our only health is the disease
If we obey the dying nurse
Whose constant care is n...

Morning, early spring, maryhill, glasgow

poem: sunlight on the wings of birds

you lie on the bed like sunlight
sunlight on the wings of birds

no, you don't

(this is why poetry is rarely to be trusted:
unable to accept things as they are
it has to turn them into things they are not)

you lie on the bed like yourself
yourself lying naked on a bed

and to compare you to anything else
would be to make you less than you are

Public phone, maryhill, glasgow