dogtrax @dogtrax@mastodon.social

Perhaps I need to do another #introduction here, since it has been some time since I did it last. My regular forays here include composing #smallpoems, writing #smallstories, sharing #smallquotes and other connected sharing threads. If you write there, I'll try to respond. I may even remix as a way to honor your writing. I try to keep my heart and mind open.

The hum of heat
filters through
the morning, as
I sit quiet, listening
to the way we seek
protection from
the outside world,
itself cold, raw and
full of wonder

#smallpoems

“The typewriter separated me from a deeper intimacy with poetry, and my hand brought me closer to that intimacy again.”

-- from The Writer’s Desk, edited by Jill Krementz, from the desk and words of Pablo Neruda , page 24

#smallquotes

The mirror collapses
when you sleep to
dream of being
awake, waiting
for sleep to come

#smallpoems

“It’s impossible to watch without tears. It’s also as great a passage of singing as you are likely to hear, if singing is to you not about the observance of musical correctitude and extravagant display and signaled passion and technical virtuosity, but about the inhabitation of the moment up to and including the moment when the moment bursts.”

-- from Voices by Nick Coleman, Preface, page xvi

#smallquotes

(referring to Patti Smith here)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=941PHEJHCwU

“The most valuable coin has always been with us, within us: the word, the call, whether shared, lent, borrowed or stolen. There is no cavern more mysterious than the mouth, bound by air and bony ignorance.”

-- from Frequencies, volume one: Open Sesame, an essay by Joshua Cohen, page 6

#smallquotes

I'm downstairs, reading a book about voice and singing, when I hear it. My son is upstairs, making beats, likely in Logic. His headphones are snug on his ears, but he is humming along to the music he is making. I can't hear the beat. All I can hear is the humming of his deepening 14-year-old voice, soft melodic lines filtering through the house. The headphones give him safety from being self-conscious about it and I won't say a thing about it later. I listen as I read. #smallstories

Scribbling words
on postcard paper;
pondering how
what I say today
puts on its shoes
in order to travel
a long way, away

#smallpoems (inspired by #clmooc postcard project)

“The human voice is the very first medium that we take for a message.”

-- from Voices (How a Great Singer Can Change Your Life) by Nick Coleman, page 3

#smallquotes

a book I #amreading with interest

Remembering lies:
the ones you
said you'd tell
me, if only
the time were
right, the ones
that made you
cry when you
thought I was
sleeping, deep
into the dead
of the night

#smallpoems

“Writers all devise ways to approach that place where they expect to make contact, where they become the conduit, or where they engage in this mysterious process. For me, light is the signal in the transition. It’s not being in the light; it’s being there before it arrives.”

-- from The Writer’s Desk, edited by Jill Krementz, on the desk and words of Toni Morrison , page 27

#smallquotes

such jagged words
these are, these
marks pushed upon
the screen, we dream
in hopes of forgetting
the scars

#smallpoems

“Writing at its inner source is a deeply comforting activity, an ordering and a purging and a bringing into the light what had been hidden an hour before. These desktops and nooks are happy places -- chaste beds of conception, rumpled and warm.”

-- from The Writer’s Desk, edited by Jill Krementz, from introduction by John Updike, page xii

#smallquotes

We bake this book
with ingredients
you may never see
so take a look
and wander through
this long forgotten sea

#smallpoems

“This book was made by the bright, single mind that is made up of all their minds, and the following pages are what it wants you to read.”

-- from The Best American Non-Required Reading 2018, introduction by Sheila Heti, page xviii

#smallquotes

(Note: this yearly anthology, which I #AmReading, is put together by high school students, who read and talk all year, gathering pieces that interest them but are mostly off the mainstream. Comics, essays, stories and others are included.)

You know how sometimes, something you've never heard of before suddenly is everywhere you look? The other day, a friend was talking about the game of Pickle Ball, which is sort of a modified indoor tennis/badminton game with large rackets and a soft ball and a low net. Never heard of Pickle Ball before. Then, our gym teacher starts talking about it with me. Then, I see a photo spread in local newspaper about Pickle Ball. Suddenly, Pickle Ball is everywhere in my field of vision. #smallstories

“Vacant lots like missing teeth gave a rough grin to the streets we haunted. Ruin was everywhere, for cities had been abandoned by the rich, by politics, by a vision of the future.”

-- from A Field Guide to Getting Lost by Rebecca Solnit, page 88

#smallquotes

The thinnest strand
exists between you
and I and the world,
and so if you hold
tight, then I'll hold
tight, and together,
we'll keep this string
thrumming

#smallpoems (for a prompt for #ds106 to write a poem of peace)

“I shouldn’t write any of this down. Any word I’ve ever written sticks to there and then there is a there there.”

-- from Frequencies, volume one: Blossoms, an essay by Blake Butler, page 48

#smallquotes
#smallstories