The old or the new Comandante
Dilecto in flagrante
Won’t burst the balloon,
Just play the worn tune:
Vote Virgil or choose a Dante
Old Jules
Posted in 2012, Government, limericks, Poetry, Politics
Tagged culture, government, Human Behavior, humor, limerick, limericks, philosophy, poems, poetry, politics, psychology, society, sociology, wrting
An election where nobody came
‘Cause the candidates were the same
Would expose the collusion
Destroy the illusion
That YOU voting wrong was to blame.
Old Jules
Made his money the hard way, inherited.
Went to Yale where he struggled and merited
Every cent that he earned
With his MBA, spurned
Do-nothings with slogans he parroted.
Old Jules
Posted in 2012, Communication, Creative Writing, Human Behavior, limericks, Poetry, Politics, The Lone Psychiatrist
Tagged culture, economy, Education, Human Behavior, humor, Life, lifestyle, limerick, limericks, philosophy, poetry, politics, psychology, writing
Time was, ages 15, 25, 35, 45, 55, an inordinate time without hearing from a friend, he’d pick up the phone. If nothing came of it, wondering whether he pissed the person off, whether something’s wrong. Does a bit of memory searching about the last meeting, conversation, communication trying to recall anything sour.
Decades roll by and a person goes through a lot of friends, discovers a lot who’d been thought of as friends weren’t, discovers there was no bottom to it, or the bottom was too soft to hold an anchor. Realizes people need to have elbow-room and it might as well include a lack of interest in continuing communication with whomever they wish. Just bugs on the windshield of the time machine.
“Wonder what ever became of old Jimbo Watkins,” a person muses. “Best man at his wedding. Can’t recall seeing him much after his 25th Anniversary party. Hmm. Most likely dead, I reckons.”
“Wonder what ever became of old David McCreary. Stayed in touch and visited all those years. God-Father to his kids, watched them grow up. Last I heard he was teaching English in China somewhere. Had a Chinese wife.
“Hmm. Most likely dead, I reckons.”
As late as the 1990s I must have seen things this way, because I wrote it:
To Stanley, Hank, and Others
Gone before
Eyesight blurs with years;
Silty pond of vision clears
Legion days march past,
Blend the timbre, tones;
Common denominator of sound
Runs down
Stirs a rich musical soup
Of drum, of trumpet,
Crash of boot on pavement,
Of human voice, human words,
Singing murmur of human
intercourse;
Cacophony in a foreign tongue
But hearing deepens.
“What’s that you say?
Cupped hand behind ear;
Study in vain his moving lips
Behind the roar;
Puzzle the melting printed word,
Uncomprehending,
Dawns the underlying truth,
River of comprehension
Beneath the racing chaos
Of the spoken word,
The printed page.
Blindness recedes
With failing sight;
Deafness fades
As hearing dies.
Oh, dear life.
Dear muted daze
Fast-forward
Psychedelic film
Of lost unknowing.
Poor, desolate ghosts
Lost in forgotten trails
Of yesteryear,
Wander on.
Take heart in your despair
Mute the silent horror;
Calm the wild
Searching eye
And rest.
And rest in peace.
From Poems of the New Old West
————————
All that damned drama. Sheeze. Seems completely foreign to me today. Words someone else wrote.
“Most likely just dead,” works a hell of a lot better. Or if I’m feeling verbose, a limerick.
Old Jules
Posted in 2012, Communication, Poetry, Senior Citizens, Solitude, Writing, Youth
Tagged aging, culture, Human Behavior, humor, Life, lifestyle, psychology, Relationships, senior citizens, society, sociology
Joe Stalin he might be
Fingers drumming green felt
Calculating his next purge
Fill an other gulag
With Ukrainians
Finger tapping
Focus on the down cards
Other players
Cardboard faces
Pasteboard numbers
Shouts past me
“Double down! Double down!”
Tired first base trucker
Parlaying his bets
To survive another hand or two
In this hell-camp.
Stalin tosses three greens
Past me to the trucker
From his four inch high
Stack of blacks and greens
“Double down! Double down!”
Astonished trucker pushes back
A weathered straw hat
Gazes at the green chips
The dealer upturned six
And his own sixteen
And doubles down.
On and on
Same vein
Stalin winks at me
At second base
Throwing chips past me
The driver promptly loses
But always looks now
To see what Stalin
Thinks is best
While downstream
In third base Stalin
Plays three hands all at once
Table max 200 on each place
And wins wins wins
Speznatz tattoos
On chubby knucklebacks
Stalin and I exchange small talk
And knowing smiles
Once advised
The other side of a line
I was on this side of
Did his final tour in Afghan
Got out first chance he could
When things got shaky
And the walls went down
Now he hauls produce
From east to west coast
Always stops here in-between
Shouting orders
“Double down! Double down!”
To the bloated capitalist pigs
Grumbles price of fuel
Trainloads of Chinese goods
And tyrant highway cops.
Old Jules
Copyright©NineLives Press
Posted in 2000's, New Mexico, NM, Poetry, Politics, Senior Citizens
Tagged History, Human Behavior, humor, Life, lifestyle, poems, poetry, politics, psychology, society, sociology
No one remembers anyone
Who remembers anyone
Who remembers
Why she died
But there she is
Wealthy woman young
Good teeth,
No slave.
Those killers
Didn’t kill the slaves
Took them away squat beneath
The loot the weight of
What they carried off
As they did before for her,
Before emancipation
To slave for someone else.
Arroyo cut through ruin
Showed her to the wind and sky
And me a thousand years
After noise and smoke
And screams
Stone hatchet broke the head
Flames brought down the roof
Around her,
Her and her kin
Charred corn
Still on cob
Beside her skull.
She died and partly burned
A long forgotten civil war
Between someone
And someone else
No one remembers
Over something
Neither wind nor sun
Nor these charred bones
Remember.
Old Jules
Copyright©NineLives Press
Posted in America, History, Human Behavior, Native American, Native Americans, New Mexico, NM, Outdoors, Poetry, Politics, Prospecting, Solitude
Tagged Anasazi, ancient america, ancient ruins, chacoan, culture, Education, Events, History, Human Behavior, Life, lifestyle, misc, miscellaneous, native american, New Mexico, other, personal, poetry, society
El Palenque doesn’t think;
Knows and loves
His only job
And does it;
Perfection without compromise.
Reality
Where owls, hawks
And sly coyotes salivate
Reduced
To lowest common denominator
When the cackling hen
Rises from a fresh-laid egg.
Old Jules
Copyright 2003 NineLives Press
The King Is Dead
Long Live The King
Behold, sweet sovereign of song,
creator, keeper, carrion king
of Rock and Roll,
how we miss you.
Old now, my liege, how we hum
how we whistle distant echoes
of your reign
and remember!
Not for you, sweet prince,
mediocre marble monuments,
bronze busts in barren halls.
How you were us!
How, in your dotage,
your swollen jowl,
your sallow cheeks,
your leaden eye
became our own.
Not for you, the canvas likeness hung on walls
with saints, small children, gods and golden men.
Not you!
For you, lord, the paper likeness,
the image on black velour;
in plaster lamps,
plastic icons,
and now this final homage
to your fiery youth.
With every moist touch of these lips, this tongue
we wash away the mucous of those later years
of yours and ours;
summon forth the young prince;
call back those vibrant times
of yesteryear
when the bud shot forth from the vine
and you emerged
and we emerged.
Every touch, sweet prince, to brush away
the bloated darkness of those later
aftertimes
and stay the past within this tiny,
glossy image forth.
Goodnight, sweet prince.
Old Jules
©NineLives Press
During the early 1990s the Coincidence Coordinators conspired to make Zuni Pueblo and the geography surrounding it a major focus in my life. I mentioned a bit about Zuni here: This is Zuni Salt Lake, but over the next couple of whiles I’d like to tell you a bit more about them.
At the time the overwhelming part of my salary was paid by FEMA and a part of my job involved mitigation of recurring natural disaster damage behind federal disaster expenditures. In New Mexico a huge percentage of the recurring expense was located on Navajo lands, but flooding on the Zuni River reared its head as a concern during the same time period.
Meanwhile, the Coincidence Coordinators got into the act. The search for the lost gold mine was being driven by documents from the US Archives, New Mexico State Archives, fragments of mention from 19th Century newspapers, later-in-life memories of men connected to the events and documented in books, topo maps and other researched sources.
Keith and I, examining and submerging ourselves together during that phase of my search, concluded the areas to the east of Zuni, and to the south were prime candidates for the location. Candidates based on what we knew at the time. Wilderness Threats.
By my own recollection that phase of the search lasted only three, maybe four years, maybe less. But it led by numerous routes, into more than a decade of closer association with Zuni, both as a tribe, and as a geography. I’ll be posting more about that, about Keith’s and my explorations, about the Zuni pueblo and the people living there, and about some aspects of the history and culture.
But I’ll begin by posting this piece of doggerel I wrote a long time ago about my first visit to the Zuni Rez and my first encounter with the Zuni and Ramah Navajo. That meeting with the Zuni Tribal Council burned itself into my memory as few things I’ve experienced this lifetime have.
Flooding on the Zuni land
Tribal chairman calls
Upstream Ramah Din’e band
Over grazing galls.
Ancient ruins I travel past
Forgotten tribes of old
And finally arrive at last
On Zuni land as told:
Tribal council meets, he chants
A time warp history.
I Listen long the raves and rants
And river mystery:
Navajo must have his sheep
To have his wealth, it’s plain.
Too many kids, too many sheep
Too little grass and rain.
Forgotten white man wrongs and deeds
The raids of Navajo
Corn that didn’t sprout the seeds
And stumbled Shalako
More sheep grazed than in the past
Arroyos grew wide and deep
Siltation settled hard and fast
In riverbed to sleep.
Navajo siltation choked
An ancient channel bed
Water rose above the banks
200 cattle dead
Houses flooded, ruined cars
Fields of grain were lost
A playground field a channel mars
And who should bear the cost?
The tribal chairman Ramah band
Listened to my tale
Stony silence, steady hand
Informed me I would fail.
“If those Zunis don’t like floods
Tell them to reduce the chances;
We’ll hold back our streams of muds
If they’ll call off their damned rain
dances.”
(Doggerel to smile by)
Old Jules
Posted in 1990's, America, Communication, History, Human Behavior, Native Americans, NM, Poetry, Politics, Prospecting
Tagged challenges, culture, economy, environment, Events, First Nations, flooding, History, Human Behavior, humor, Life, lifestyle, misc, miscellaneous, Native Americans, natural disasters, Nature, New Mexico, personal, poems, poetry, politics, sociology, Zuni
Abundant grass pastoral bliss
Hills and arroyos
Of cow-price scowls
Beyond their ken
Herd grazes reverie
Pond and hay mollified
Bicker snort sling slobber push
For turns at salt and mineral block
While even forked branch
Fence stretchers fatten
For foam tray
And clear-plastic
Heaven
Of beef futures
Old Jules
Copyright NineLives Press
74 years old, a resident of Leavenworth, KS, in an apartment located on the VA campus. Partnered with a black shorthaired cat named Mister Midnight. (1943-2020)
Since April, 2020, this blog is maintained by Jeanne Kasten (See "About" page for further information).
https://sofarfromheaven.com/2020/04/21/au-revoir-old-jules-jack-purcell/
So Far From Heaven 