How to Get Lost

  1. Plan an easy walk in the woods.
  2. Don’t forget to bring matches and knife.
  3. If you think there’ll be muggers bring a big knife.
  4. Walk on trail admiring trees, streams, and wildlife.
  5. Be so focused on that zen awareness of your surroundings that you forget to follow the trail markers.
  6. Find different color trail markers and assume that it is the same trail.
  7. Don’t bring a compass and whatever you do, don’t consult your phone for location. That’s cheating!
  8. Follow that fox or eagle.
  9. Realize you’re lost.
  10. Try to get back to your car. Hmmm…

How to Tech!

  1. Get a nice martini.
  2. Watch a video about the tech problem.
  3. The video expert should talk about themselves for at least 10 minutes before showing you anything.
  4. Make sure the person doing the video talks as quickly as a cheetah runs
  5. To be a real expert, the video person must say “and I just click here” at least 8 times
  6. Whatever they’re clicking on must be obscured.
  7. Get another martini.
  8. Make sure the video person moves the cursor too rapidly to be seen.
  9. All images should be too small, out of focus, or irrevelant
  10. Get another martini.

Baltimore Harbor

sailboats and high rises
seagulls and flags
water ripples in concentric circles
ducks preen and squabble 
among themselves 
the sunken iron tug
a nursery for ducklings
clack of metal on mast
tweet, hoo, cak cak
call of seagull
as they take flight
this chipped-paint picnic table
my parlor
the floor
littered with shells

Weeds

grass resents pavement

gleefully thrusts though cracks

encourages dandelion havoc

and escaped petunias rabble rousers.

i walk in dawn

sun rising inexorably

to glint off glass skyscrapers

 and church steeples.

look down

grass blades shadow each other

spiral marestail weeds

spin my gaze

rising stridently

from pavement’s weakness. 

i revel

in weeds’ resistance

against the transgression

of human dominance and desire

to cover earth

with sharp angled concrete

subjugate this breathing globe

and bring us all to destruction.

June 2020, revised Dec 2021

Leda and the Swan

The swan has a shlong.
Sweet ladies did swoon,
“Your shlong is so long.”

Leda said, “Nay,
I won’t give it a play.”
The swam smiled slyly,
“Let me show you my tongue”

Leda’s eyes twinkled
She liked the new wrinkle.
The tongue matched the shlong.
It rang her gong.