skull lull

I am watching the nether rounds of the NFL draft. Surprise, Ether. The passivist poet loves football. Specifically, I am waiting for the Redskins to pick--my team since the Virginia days. Among the hundred other heartaches in the last 20 years--those knuckleheads have contributed a fair share. Every fall, the crows have a field day from elsewhere watching me suffer the sundry slings and arrows of outrageous pass protection. (To borrow irreverently from Shakespeare.)

Meanwhile, it is storming in the southeast. I woke to thunders throughout the night, and now the rain comes in torrents. Needless to say, golf plans have been exchanged, only half-begrudgingly, for nap plans. One thing is for sure, this post is likely to be the most productive thing I do today. Unless, of course, like the lightning outside, a strike of fortuity rattles some dormant creativity in my brain during one of my nap-dreams and I wake up full of the ideas that have been AWOL since I [a]finished writing my novel and [b]started taking Lexapro. As they happened concurrently, it's hard to tell whether [a] or [b] or both is to blame for my lack of inspiration. I suspect it's both. As a matter of fact, if it was not for these occasional conversations with you, I reckon I would not be writing at all.

Here is a poem taking on both of today's themes. The storm outside my window and the lull inside my skull.

Weather

A three o’clock evening
In the afternoon. Clouds
Shoulder the half-day’s
Heat and droop
A makeshift awning.

A fox squirrel drops
His beechnut and noses
The air. The sudden wind—
Ratcheting, ratcheting—
Draws things near,
Hunched and huddled
Like the piebald cat
Against the screened back-door.

And the things to do:
The chicken dinner,
The weekly sit-com,
The bedtime read,
The clumsy career towards dementia.

Electricity muscles heavy
Air and booms, rattling
The loose window panes.
All night the muted
Xylophone of rain
Against the chimney grate
And gutters is just soft
Enough to sleep by.

In the morning--
A ten o’clock dawn.
Clouds loiter, obscuring
The already busy sun.

And what must briefly wait:
The cornflake breakfast,
The weekly trash haul,
The morning read,
The goofy trundle towards decay.