which one, pictures or diagrams?

My sister banging on the door of the funeral home

to give to the funeral director a pair of socks so that the feet of her

dead niece wouldn't be cold.

Which in some tangled fantasticate

was the act of the purest of mad women.

Then I thought, this is it.

This is the great metaphor i'd hoped for/

Some among us wait a lifetime for this moment,

like Mantle explaining to the universe

the sweet spot on that Spalding "Black Betsy"

or Jordan trying to explain "the zone",

"when everything you throw in the air, just falls",

I think he said. When I was younger

and pulling the string on the "See and Say"

all it took was a gentle twist

of a sticky palm to get the same response

but for others the imagined flesh wont

speak without coaxing. Like the man with

the camera phone who captures the

last blue whale's

breach. Then drops it in the sea.

Reviews

[Rewel Acosta Rivera]

Life is so deep meaning that we just see the less of it. I love as show the pain of life, and the side of life that hurts. So is part of it. Meanwhile we have to have the best of it.

Thanks for share this deep poem. I love the scenes ans the powers of your words.

[W.k.kortas]

To piggy back on what the wise Delmar said (I should be so succinct) and jacob as well...as far as the Jordan reference goes, if you've played any ball at all, you have at least a rudimentary feel for what he could do, as well as those days (well, minutes for most of us) when you would let fly with 18-footers and just know in the maw of your soul, know better than your own name, that it was money, no point in following it in for a rebound that wasn't gonna happen. It's the feeling of plugging into something common to all of us but intangible (comforting perhaps, disquieting maybe, but absolutely eerie), the things leading us to those acts which are "the purest of mad women", the notion of providing socks for a dead niece, absolutely pointless on its face yet wholly understandable. You've tapped into that in this piece, and expressed it in a way the rest of us can only sigh about as we read.

[The Twin Arenas]

All of this and what it is - this is your best work

[Gerry Legister]

To capturing those moments is tremendous

[Ken Simm.]

In a piece filled with such creative concepts; the first and the last stand out as efforts of the true creative mind, for me at least. Mind you the whole work is a feast smoothly dragging my feeble mind across vistas I can only wonder at.

[Delmar Cooper]

Well done. Who else could explain in a few lines the concept of Zen and the concept of Irony and make them compatible?

[jacob erin-cilberto]

oh dropping that camera into the sea...that would kill some people.
i like how you brought the metaphor to light here....as something that just naturally happened because of a situation...not a metaphor that was thought out for hours or days...it just happened.

a moment....yes, like mantle and the "black betsy"---he was my hero, as i grew up in the Bronx, two miles from yankee stadium.
and Jordan so often in the zone...like poets often are when the are writing...
it just happens... those moments just happen.

and this poem just happens to be such a gem...

imagine writing a great poem on a typewriter, capturing that moment in words, then dropping the typewriter into the sea?