Blunt Scissors Cutting Out Careful Squares

• Bell's Dead Man claimed, woof
• The bipolar self-portrait 
• I will not fly it daily to signal up or down not only because I don't know minute to minute but don't know which face up which face down

• Dietles reopening?
• Ghost Town Disc Golf. I have not thrown a disc in at least six months, I hike with Earthgirl every possible day instead, I miss throwing discs
• Serendipity be blessed, Dr Z, who I met at parties to nod in familiarity but only got to know when he bartended at Dietles emailed me earlier this week about disc golfing again, then today, the article on Dietles (possibly) reopening then within an hour an article about a disc golf course
• My warrenite colleague apoplectic about Bloomberg, I said, he won't take one vote from Sanders but you think he'll take votes from Warren and if so why? and she said, it *is* going to Clinton isn't it, and I said, yes
• Crackers, the best weapon of professional Democrats and their sociopath overlords
• Group photo
• my miracle now
• Remembering Stephen Dixon. Again, I respected more than liked. I read at the time of Frog and Interstate more from obligation than desire, much as I read Sorrentino and Mathews, to keep abreast of whatever I then felt necessary to keep abreast of. I know but don't remember what that was.
• Artless
• John's playing this just now on WFMU, I was listening to Ashley two nights ago, blessed be

PROOF OF POETRY

Tom Sleigh

I wanted first to end up as a drunk in the gutter

and in my twenties I almost ended up there—

  

and then as an alternative to vodka, to live

  

alone like a hermit philosopher and court

the extreme poverty that I suspected lay in store for me anyway—

  

and then there were the years in which

  

I needed very badly to take refuge in mediocrity,

years like blunt scissors cutting out careful squares,

  

and that was the worst, the very worst—

  

you could say that always my life

was like a patchwork quilt always ripped apart—

  

my life like scraps stitched together in a dream

  

in which animals and people,

plants, chimeras, stars,

  

even minerals were in a preordained harmony—

  

a dream forgotten because it has to be forgotten,

but that I looked for desperately, but only sporadically

  

found in fragments, a hand lifted to strike

  

or caress or simply lifted for some unknown reason—

and in memory too, some specific pain, sensation of cold or warmth.

  

I loved that harmony in all its stages of passion,

  

the voices still talking inside me . . . but then, instead of harmony,

there was nothing but rags scattered on the ground.

  

And maybe that's all it means to be a poet.