They never changed that room.
Dolls, teddy bears, trains,
And transformers all hold space,
Lock time in perpetual stasis.
When death comes life stops.

Family said they should pack
Things away. It’s too hard
To be reminded day after day
Of a future lost in the past,
But a room can be a memorial.

It’s a museum of childhood,
Until a child of a later
Generation discovers it with
Glee....

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Each mover, save one Renaissance man
Of fellow feeling, complained of the books
And the bookshelves to display them.
Why would anyone move these thousands
Of miles and from house to house when
They are so obviously rarely used?

But the bookshelves, fully loaded, serve a purpose:

For starters, they tell anyone curious enough to look
Where and how my intellectual development has unfolded...

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Know how in the 1970s the televangelists
All had perfectly sculpted and blow-dried hair?
Well, my Daddy was at least partly responsible
For all that glitz and fancy get-up.

He didn’t do hair for anyone as famous
As Pat Robertson or Jim Bakker, but
Styled hair for some big traveling evangelists
Like Gene Williams. These guys would take the
Word of God around the world, but come back
To G...

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I have no roots –

only memories.

Present becomes past before my eyes

Life is lived, recorded there, somehow,

More or less imperfectly inscribed

Within my head, thus stored behind my brow.

These things exist for me, just in my mind,

For if I try to seek them out again

There’s only ever something new to find:

Nothing in the stillness can remain.

I have no root...

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Day 8 of NaPoWriMo asks us to write poetry using the jargon of our professions (or someone else’s profession). As a philosophy instructor, my only learning objective was to destroy the smug and self-satisfied confidence my students had in their own knowledge. Petty of me, I know.

On the Destructive Power of Measureable Learning Objectives

Your destruction is both
Achievable and measurable
...

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If I could take the thoughts you most like to think

And sculpt them into text that speaks to you as art,

If I could take the feelings you most want to share

And mirror them in words, reflected in your heart,

Then would you more easily forgive my selfish pen?

Excuse the vacant looks, the lost half-hours when

I am not yours, as I wander some distant mental shore?

If you liked my...

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The prompt for day six of NaPoWriMo was to write a poem dealing with counterfactual conditionals, as it were. Here is mine:

Accepting an Infinite Regression of Causes

If only life had come into being
On different terms, according to a different template.

If pain weren’t the primary motivating factor
For keeping life propelling itself forward,

If the best of all possible worlds weren’...

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