I’m posting this poem tonight for my friend Joseph, who knows the earth and is sad.

MY FATHER’S BIRDS

The sky holds my father’s attention.
Birds come out of the sky
to his birdbaths and feeders.
He calls them by their common,
friendly names.

After he retired, he strapped
himself into little airplanes of nylon and aluminum,
and went off to see where birds are from.

I was afraid of the sun’s terrible temper,
the hard rolling clouds.
Afraid he would fly off, leave me
here to be a man.
I was afraid that his birds
came from heaven.

© 1999 Kyle Kimberlin

Looks like I’ve got a problem with Bloglines, which supplies my blogroll, and usually works great. After each link it says DEBUG: Id:7666704 Type:0 ….. I tried re-importing the code, then sent them a message. Mean time, the links still work. Some cool stuff there, Maynard.

Update: Looks like it’s fixed. Nice of them to get it fixed over the weekend, huh?

I mean Bite me, Kazaa! You scary piece of crapity crap.

My Limewire p2p wasn’t working tonight; hasn’t been for a while, despite a download of the new version. Won’t connect. Anyway, I decided to download Kazaa, which I’ve used before with nominal success. So I did. And it installed. Next thing I knew, and it wasn’t more than a minute after install, my happy little Dell desktop was completly bugshit. No folders would open. The start menu was frozen. Stayed that way after rebooting, which I had to do by means of the power button on the tower, ‘cuz it wouldn’t shut down.

An hour later, having somehow been able to uninstall both Kazaa Krap and the moldy limewire, and doing a system restore, and a backup of docs to CD, things seem to be normal. But hey, screw downloading tunes. All I wanted was Behind Blue Eyes, which is highly apt to my mood:

When my fist clenches, crack it open
Before I use it and lose my cool
When I smile, tell me some bad news
Before I laugh and act like a fool

I’m writing tonight. Sorry. No time to say hello, goodbye …

Here’s one of my all-time favorite Bible verse to ponder.

Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, and cometh down from the Father of lights, with whom is no variableness, neither shadow of turning.
James 1:16-18

…from one of my favorite movies, The Quiet Man.

No patty fingers, if you please. The proprieties at all times. Hold on to your hats.

Hey kids, it’s Pete Beck appreciation day. That one day a year — other than his birthday — when we tell Pete how much we appreciate him, just for being a cool guy. Just for setting up the keg. For playin’ in the band. For not calling the Authorities on my crazyass girlfriend. I know that if I had the energy to cheat gravity and ease some big boxes down from the high shelves of the closet, I could find and post an amusing photo of Pete, circa 1982. But I don’t. So a few lines from the English Beat will have to do.

“Mirror in the bathroom
Recompense
For all my crimes
of self defense.
Cures you whisper
make no sense
Drift gently into
mental illness.”

I thought about the Dead Kennedys, but … well, no. Not even for Pete. I also thought about Journey, just to watch the cat lick it up, but I don’t know you all would get the joke.

So here’s to you, Pete. May the wind be always at your back. Next year, maybe we can get Jerry Falwell to sign a card for ya.

It’s really an awful dilemma. The S.F. Mayor is considering a Pit Bull Ban following the mauling death of a 12-year-old boy. I know there are a lot of people out there who love their pit bulls, consider them loyal and lovable members of the family. The were the most decorated, heroic military dogs in WWII. People who know them say it’s not the breed, it’s the handling. Nothing about the death of Nicholas Faibish seems to bear that out. And lots of people fear the breed’s incredible strength and tenacity. Pit Bulls have certainly killed people they should have been loyal to, like Nicholas.

So I don’t know. I don’t like reactionary, paternalistic laws. But whether there’s a ban or not, I have to ask myself: Would I want a pit bull around my four-year-old nephew? Or my mother? For that matter, would I want to be alone with a PB that I didn’t know, even if the owner said s/he was totally docile? No. I don’t trust them.

I don’t even totally trust my sheltie if my nephew were to run up to her. She might nip; sometimes nature wins out over nurture.

I always like it when a major award goes to an artist working outside the right circles.

CBC Arts: Albanian writer wins new international Booker prize

It was a pretty day here in our small town. Sunny and warm. I had coffee with a buddy downtown, and we talked about writing and stuff. You want to see a vignette I wrote last night? You can check it out here. All rights are reserved on that puppy.

My Dad called from Texas, and my brother called from Northern California, to wish me a happy birthday. Mom made us a nice dinner.

Dad said he baited his hook and cast his line off my uncle’s party barge, out on the lake. Leaned the pole up against the inside of the boat. Then he turned to talk to my uncle and some fool fish jerked the whole rig – rod and reel – into the water, never to be seen again. Which explains why he called me from the parking lot of Wal-Mart. How ’bout that, huh? Talk about biting off more than you can chew.

Things are blooming nicely. Here’s a yellow rose from the parental back yard.

click to enlarge

Speaking of blooming, I’m enjoying writing the short fiction pieces – vignettes – that you can find on my Web site. (There’s a link under the gull in the sidebar; click Creative.) They seem to be a natural evolution of the poetry I’ve been writing for the past 25 years. [Holy crap.]

I was thinking this afternoon about how my writing has changed in that time. I no longer feel a need to impress you with obscurity, to pepper my work with allusions to TS Eliot, Dante, and the Grateful Dead. I’m looking for real people, just to catch a glimpse of them; just a snapshot of the human heart. Maybe a tenuous tug on the mysticism of sitting on the tailgate of a pickup truck. Or at your kitchen table, when you suddenly realize you hold the coffee mug just like your grandfather did.

Anyhoo, here’s to me. God grant me many summers.

Happy birthday to me. I’m 44. Mid 40s. Middle aged.
Old enough to know better, too old to miss doing it anyway.

“I have no idea what happened but now I am not the same”
–Pablo Neruda

Congressman John Conyers Jr., a Democrat from Michigan, has a letter on his site calling on the Bush Administration to come clean about the Downing Street Memo and the Iraq war. Wow. The MSM’s ostrich act may not pay off after all.

It’s probably an excellent book. Really. But see, I’m surfing around in writers’ sites and blogs, and I found an excerpt of a novel by Tod Goldberg, which begins:

“From Chapter One

I am haunted by a memory I can’t recall. “

It’s just me, right?