run, Buddy, run

Last week I shared in this space the poem “Summer Found Me”, from the new poetry collection, “my startled heart.” The first stanza of that poem ends with this line – “Me all silent, stupefied, blown out with thinking.”

Often writers are encouraged to “Write what you know”, and sometimes I do that and there’s times when I stray away. Writing the word “stupefied”, I was writing what I know. That was then. Lately, I’ve been walking around in what’s been an oh-so-clear state of dumbfounded-ness. Like all the time. As “stupefied” and “dumbfounded” likely flow out of the words, and their understood intentions, “stupid” and “dumb”, I’d say they’re something like first cousins. Kissing cousins, even. So standing stupefied within a summer breeze next to a eucalyptus glade, and walking the streets of San Diego and sitting in the recliner with a coffee, and there in the tangle of four feet on a slow-dance floor, there’s been nothing but my wide-awake dumbfounded experience of the moment. Maybe endlessly. At least the last couple of weeks.

My long-ago mentor Frenchie, whom I quote often, was always saying, “I don’t know nothing about nothing.” What’s to know but right now? There’s something like that – in the awe expressed in the poem, while walking a suspension bridge in the heart of the city – which rings so clearly in my ears and eyes and fingers and tangled feet. Think, “Stupid is as stupid does.” Think, “Life is just a box of stupid.”

Why I’m running directly into the heart of it all.

Oh – this spoke so much to me yesterday: “I vow to wait for the beams of the moon.”

See.