Merging

I’m for it. The way column A drifts over to column B. Sweet and sour, hot and pungent.  How Oppenheimer is both a big movie and a small one. And American Fiction is a serious spoof. If you think you know me, you don’t know the half. 

Wouldja-couldja. Couldja-wouldja. Apple-pears and fusion foodja. Hybrid gender. Hybrid cars. Quantum particles Quantum waves. 

Watching the ice-skating championships, I was transfixed by the artistry, the precision of the couples, the lifts and the landings. Awe describes my state of mind yet it is also a sport with triple Lutz and toe loops. The commentators talk about a wobble and bobble. All I see is the sublime.

For the unknowing eye baseball is boring; football, brutal and basketball is swagger. For those of us with arrested development like myself, basketball is balletic, football is chess with stretchers and baseball, life itself. I am now rounding third on my way home; with no clock to be seen this could take years.

When Donald first reared his artificial head I saw Bozo the Clown, P.T. Barnum, then Adolph and Benito, Jim Jones, Richard III and finally Vladimir Putin The question still remains: handcuffs or straight jacket or both? His mouth is a weapon of mass destruction. The calculating manipulator and mindless sociopath have merged.

In the literary world a memoir is likely to have as much fiction as a novel and a book of historic fiction sprinkled with provocative ideas. Some narrative poetry reads like an anecdote.

I started writing poetry about fifty years ago in between labels as a pharmacist. After my work found its way into literary journals, I began to question what made this a poem and not a paragraph. There began the merging. Some words sing; some need line breaks but others shed the stanza and were comfortable as prose or blogs. There may be poetry hiding in the sentences.

My first book is entitled The Marriage of Everything. I see life as a web of connective tissue. The rose with its scent; the rose with its thorns. Petals as life ephemeral; thorns as death daring. The two in a melodic dirge. The streets of Laredo. Mack the Knife. Donald testing the fiber of democracy.

Maybe, just maybe, we needed this historical moment to pause and value what we have achieved and the fragility of its tremble. From the merging comes something emergent.