behind the headlines (archives)

i felt a rotting albatross

around my neck was hung

the barrel of my .38

was pungent on my tongue

a deadly glass of poison

was lifted to my lips

the suicide solution

was at my fingertips

but then i realized

in the pit of my despair

that suicide is pointless if

there’s no one who would care

and that’s when i decided

on a plan so cold and cruel

i grabbed my automatic

and i strolled into the school

and all the while thinking

that the world would surely heed

the pain that they’d inflicted

to make me do this deed

and when the blood-bath ended

it was time to end it all

and so i blew my brains out

on the high school classroom wall

and now just like the albatross

i’m rotting here in hell

and yet the world remains unchanged

as far as i can tell

Dawn’s Early Light

When my son and I went down to the lake for some early-morning photography, we couldn’t believe our eyes: there, in the dawn’s early light, it appeared as though some great sea monsters had emerged from the deep in the night. All up and down the shoreline, these scaly leviathans were silhouetted against the saffron sky. It reminded me of a pod of beached whales.

The daylight revealed something almost as strange: the monsters had become huge piles of ice, which form (I later learned) when broken-up ice is driven by high winds to the shoreline; it’s a naturally occurring phenomenon called ice-stacking. So much for sea monsters.

in the dark, we can

only imagine monsters–

at dawn, we see them

–photos by me

Jim Carrey Quote

With Christmas bearing down on us, I must confess that there’s a part of it I hate. Sure, the gift-giving and spiritual side of it is wonderful, but the hyped up in-your-face commercialism is worrisome. Are we teaching our children that happiness is about having “things”? Take it from a guy who knows a thing or two about having it all, Jim Carrey:

“I wish that everyone would find success,

become rich and famous, and acquire

everything they’ve ever wanted–

so they could finally realize that it

wasn’t what they were looking for.”

–AI generated image (had to try it)