Joy of poetry

 Joy

I once had friends 

Who shared poetry

With me

From Katie to Joy

I remember them all.

Angeline

 926-1371

Calling Angeline Donaldson

On Highway 61

In Buckhorn

The little boy we learned

Has been burned 

Scalded with coffee

He's asking for you

Please come

Hold him in your

Black arms

We are so alarmed

We may lose 

Little Jumpy.

Cats in the cradle

 And the cats in the cradle

In the iPhone consumed

Little boy blue and the man

On the itune

When you gonna look up Dad 

I don't know when, but by then, the wind will be gone

But then you'll be scrolling.

I know you'll have a great time scrolling.

I floundered

There are memories etched deeper in the plate and one is going floundering with Sam Dunlap and his father. We went to Mashes Sand beach out from Panacea. Mr Dunlap gave us a gig and a head light and in the shallows we waded looking for the one sided fish in the sand. It was a magical time with the head light illuminating the life beneath the tide. 

Race with time

 one mile of life remaining....the poison in the vein coursing….too far along I had come....so the final mile I would run....set the timer to zero....time to go....crossed the line in four thirty three...some minutes later time caught up…...what a great

time to enter eternity....

In my life

 In my life 

In my life of moving vehicles to photograph them, one of my first tasks after setting the A/C, is switching the SXM station if a vehicle is so equipped, from the various obnoxious rap stations laced with profanity, to channel 18.

And I am for a short duration, back to February 9, 1964, watching Ed Sullivan on the black and white television announcing, “ladies and gentlemen, the Beatles!”

And the world began screaming and hasn’t stopped since. Up until that time, I never put much thought into music. My sister had her 45’s she and her girlfriends would play at slumber parties, groups such as Jan and Dean, the Dave Clark Five, The Beach Boys, nothing they’d scream over.

I did not aspire to become a Beatle that night. I wanted to become a Bart Star Quarterback of the Green Bay Packers. And in that summer of ‘63, when in Monticello I took second in the Pafford Motors Punt, Pass and Kick, winning a Washington Redskin helmet, I was let down it was burgundy with a feather. I considered painting it green and yellow. 

Then in the Spring of ‘68, after four of my 4th grade friends won the Jefferson Elementary talent show, impersonating the Fab Four, down to wigs from the downtown toy store, seeing how the girls even screamed over them, Bart was a falling Star.

I begged mamma to let me buy a Beatle wig. I now listened with my sister and her 45’s.

But like all fads that last a lifetime, we moved from Monticello to Kentucky that year, and the Beatles were no longer played much. I think the only album I ever owned, from one of those record clubs, was Rubber Soul.

But their music never left me, all the way through The Monkees, through the Cat Stevens years, the Pink Floyd Metal Years, The Bee Gees disco out of joint right up to today where I paused maybe a bit too long in that cool F-150 King Ranch, totally immersed in the Beatles singing In My Life, and of all the faces I remembered sitting there.

Exit

 Seldom do we stumble going in

Putting our best foot forward

But oh the stumbling going out

Snubbing and cursing without 

a word.

Sopchoppy

 Let us labor

Johnclarestokes 

I think of those now gone on

Some to eternal worlds

Others yet remaining here 

And I’m ever grateful for their labors

In the kingdom not of calloused hands

Men as ZT Johnson of Asbury 

Who helped usher me into the kingdom

A father, Luther Ray, who welcomed me

At the altar of repentance 

There were many following

Razziel at Florida Southern my brother

Mentoring me so lovingly

A long chain of laborers 

From Russell and a community praying

Melanie back to us

To Aaron singing softly to a dying mother

Touching beyond knowing this

Heart prone to hardening

So grateful for the workers in the vineyard 

So looking forward to drinking in

The fruits of their labors one day.

The “first” church

This was the first church my father oversaw the building of, the Sopchoppy Methodist Church. It replaced a grand old wood building upon hindsight I wish they had preserved, along with the old wooden Baptist church behind it. Our white block parsonage is beside it. Today the parsonage is gone, it’s no longer a Methodist church, as years ago they purchased the new brick Baptist Church beside it, who built a new church west of town.

Death Bed Confessions

 Death bed confessions

Upon the death beds

Heard confessing

You were the one

Never in my possession

Though I carried you

All these years

Locked up deep inside

Where we'd abide

In your fine longhand cursive 

Writing down the poetry

For only our eyes inside

Our confines

In my final dying

Take the words so secret

And scatter them liberally

About the wondering ones 

Don't fear our uncovering

The words rhyme in a 

Dialect foreign.

Impale me

 If I dare

Good friend

 John Sauls is becoming a good friend. Today helping me install a porch ceiling fan.

The Word

 One word