by Alan Harris
1995
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Free PDF download of this entire book: Writing All Over the World's Wall in Adobe Acrobat PDF format (29 formatted pages including color photos) Free Adobe Acrobat Reader is required. |
Contents
(Click on any divider between selections to return here.)
Needlework
Pokes and Turns of Thought
Mankind's three deepest imponderables are infinity, eternity, and stupidity.
A good friendship, like a good river, comes back together after hitting a rock.
Even when things are all in place, they're very close to being out of place.
Most of us know someone whose purity of soul smells a bit like bleach.
Richest blessings move slowly because so much moves.
As for best-laid plans, mice do much better.
What could be sweeter than success, or briefer?
A teardrop is a liqueur to the future.
Quantitative psychology sticks its pins through living butterflies.
Retail marketing is the last frontier of nonsense.
Picture your worst fear. Now don't. Feel better?
Friends have love without vows, faithfulness without reason.
Who deserves to beg? At some time, everybody.
Ride in your car; ride in a mystery.
Insurance companies and doctors agree on one thing: nothing.
The kindness of a kind teacher is the kindest kindness of all.
Scientists have discovered few forms of life that behave more predictably
than a manager on the way up.
When the chariot swings low for my soul, slip the horses some extra oats, okay?
Our commencement speaker revealed at length his firm grasp of the obvious.
Every new human being is an impossibility become inevitable.
Diet-conscious cannibals may eat only vegetarians.
Few besides Realtors love a snob.
In an emotional universe, kisses are the gravity.
Rumors are disagreeable to many; but then, so is the truth.
Anything you can get away with, you can't.
Christmas and a minimum universe both require a star and some generosity.
Friendships with others bring us heaven before heaven.
Brilliance needs words; character, pauses.
Fame is a sea that washes up new names like foam onto beaches.
Morning Prayer
Now I wake me up from bed;
I thank the Lord I'm still not dead.
The Lord declined my soul to take
for reasons which remain opaque.
Consensus usually belongs to the first one who dares to ahem and summarize.
"Employees Must Wash Hands" posted in the restroom translates to
"Dine Elsewhere" even if no cockroaches are currently visible.
Need we be terribly surprised at the shortcomings of a world
that is substantially run by the personalities who dominate meetings?
Today remains our only hope for tomorrow's yesterday.
Nothing deepens character like a firmly balanced dilemma.
The corn husk will never understand the corn.
Hint to Bottom-Line CEO's
Reducing employees to digits
may cause a cessation of widgets.
To find order in chaos, stop looking there.
Everybody is said to be unique, but most people are unique in about the same way.
Even as a bud, given water, becomes a flower,
the office sycophant, given power, will become an autocrat.
For chest cold recovery, we must learn to always expectorate the unexpectorated.
Leave the past behind you, but if part of it gets back in front of you, ask it why.
In truest love, giving and taking become moot.
The teeth of adversity grow directly behind the smile of fortune.
A local church begins as a fire in people's hearts,
and sometimes ends as a structure whose windows no one wants to wash.
For TV addicts, death may cause minor personality changes.
He deceived her in ways which made her feel so loved.
A newborn's first thought: "Now what?"
Adolph Hitler was reputedly the Dictatorian of his high school
graduating class.
It is better to have tried and failed than never to have failed
at all.
After a motivational seminar I feel like new frosting on an old
cake.
During college his deepest thought never got down as far as his
knees.
He smiled his way to power,
enjoyed his sunny hour,
then made some big boys frown
and smiled his way back down.
A politician walked up to the Pearly Gates, shook St. Peter's
hand vigorously,
and announced, "God has my full support."
If you would hear the song of the infinite, listen quietly through
the ends of your toes.
He carefully hid his feeling of superiority behind a smug expression.
All of life is a near-death experience.
Tears are from the soul wetting its pants.
Every day is more evidence of forever.
Motherhood is hereditary. If you never had a mother,
chances are
your children won't have one either.
After all I've been through, hell should be a breeze.
Dogs offer you humility, while cats invite it.
A shelf in need is a floor indeed.
Exits from the freeway of truth begin at a small angle.
The hell you feel is the one that's real.
Why can't we not worry by not wanting to worry?
Reality is what's left to us after all of our failures to find
it.
Hell provides a room
for people who assume,
which gets some ventilation,
but my, what a population!
Kind acts never die,
and what is kind in yourself
was waiting for you.
His dark blue suit had yes written all over it.
It's easy to be critical, but it's even easier to be bureaucratic,
which is why bureaucracy is always ahead of its critics.
The caskets of beggars and vice presidents close with the same
snap.
Hell is an archive of souls too interesting for heaven.
Technology offers a profusion of easier ways to live a life we
don't understand.
If God had forbidden the snake too, would Adam and Eve have eaten
it for dessert?
In his climb up the corporate ladder he was able to overcome all
vestiges of past humility.
Senile? Not me. I can't remember the last time I forgot something.
A lottery consists of a few million poor fools chipping in to
create a rich one.
God hells those who hell themselves.
Infinity is the quickest shortcut to the unknown.
People you have to interrupt so they can see your side, won't.
Nice days are more made than had.
I have my life well under control except for:
how much I eat,
how much I sleep,
what I say
what I do.
You know you're getting old when you notice that
your first name
is being given to babies again.
Pessimist: looks both ways before crossing a one-way street.
Corpse: didn't.
Is this a user-friendly universe?
Computers won't ever become minds until they can cry--and mean
it.
Creativity leads to crisis, which leads to creativity.
American work ethic: busy is good, frantic is excellent, and burnt-out
is sublime.
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Pieces of Eight
The numbered lists which follow all consist of 8-word sentences.
8 x 20
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13 Signs of Bad Luck
It is bad luck if:
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Frequently Asked Questions about Christmas
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Q: If Santa doesn't have to age, then why has he become old? A: He only appears to be old. He's an undercover kid.
Q: How can a sleigh possibly fly through the air?
Q: Why do we wish people a "Merry Christmas" instead of a "Happy Christmas"?
Q: Why is a Christmas tree that has been chopped down called a "live Christmas tree"?
Q: Why do we wrap our Christmas gifts with paper?
Q: How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?
Q: How many gifts can Santa Claus's bag hold?
Q: How could a star that is high in the sky lead the Wise Men to a tiny manger on the ground?
Q: Is there really a Mrs. Santa Claus?
Q: Why do we hear so many bells at Christmas time?
Q: Why do so many people ring bells at Christmas time?
Q: What can't words say? |
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Above FAQ is included in the
Christmas Reflections PDF book Holiday poems to print for gifts or for keeps Free PDF Download - 2.0 MB, 18 pages Requires Adobe Acrobat Reader (also free) |
1995 Poems
Poetry Poem
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Awfully many poems these days seem chains of syntactical screams with metaphors careening on two wheels and coy diction that raises its hand and says "I said that!" Some poems are easily read like the smile of a friend you are visiting who sits you down on a clean couch with a peanut butter cookie and makes you feel warm inside with talk and apple cider. Darker poems can insinuate somewhere below your belt with startling obscurity or grab greasily at your possibilities. Kinds and kinds of poems spring to being like sparks from a grindstone that sharpens inner tools. Poets tell lies that are deeper than truth, and refuse to quit writing all over the world's wall. How is a poem written? Find one inside and watch. |
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Confined
To a Guest Reading by Paul Meier|
Nothing but a precise second hand is moving within the solitary stillness of this house. I convalesce and convalesce while reading the daily wallpaper. Knickknacks cling tightly to their positions, dumbly flaunting their faded novelty close to books of past power that slump on their shelves like half-fallen dominoes. Fatigued by the familiar and glued down by gravity, I lie back, later sit up, then move about, then sit again, a restless captive of fever and furnishings. Every other person in the world just now is elsewhere and occupied. Have I secretly died? "Snap," replies the house, settling. I lie back down close to my accurate quartz-driven clock whose second hand counts out sixty clockwise clicks and on and on until the wallpaper blurs and nothing occurs. |
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Bunga Rucka
Photographic Version
Audio Performance with Percussion
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We are murmurs we know nothing Bunga Rucka Bunga Rucka We live down above exactness Nothing say we nothing say we Here between betweens we listen Bunga Rucka Bunga Rucka Nothing here no nothing here Below the Bunga Rucka line No speaking here no words not one No thinking down in under here More underneath than want or wish Where where is never when is nowhere Happy laughter high and deep goes Snortle chortle yukka yukka Sweet it sounds above our silent Seepings in and in and in where Bunga Rucka know no knowledge Bunga Rucka love all loving Bunga Rucka shine all darkness Bunga Rucka shout all silence Bunga Rucka Bunga Rucka Feel us in you Bunga Rucka Feel you in us Bunga Rucka Bunga Rucka Bunga Rucka |
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Colorado Joining, 1995
Jim & Annette CampbellGreg & Lois Harris
Art & Jeanette Mark
Ralph & Jeanne Wiley
Alan & Linda Harris
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Five couples, each married within a love they cannot explain-- Five couples, amply tested by fear and the unexpected-- Five couples, totaling more than 500 years on this sweet, dangerous earth-- Five couples, homes scattered across the map like peppers across a pizza-- Five couples congregated for a week in the same house like ten peas in a pod-- Five couples who know the grieving and groaning of loss-- Five couples who know the ecstasy of tearful laughing-- Five couples discovering their unknown way as they walk together in grace and joy and love. |
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Forgotten Flowers
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Through an oversight the following poems escaped compilation in previous books, and were discovered in the back of a lower file drawer. Making a late debut below are A Wiggy Sopsty, written in 1988, and seven other poems written in 1991-92. |
Homeglow after Visitors
To a Reading by Alan Harris|
Two couches smile in dim light over the active weights they recently bore. Spots on the wallpaper remember certain apt verbs. Ceiling regions glow with laughings over sudden quips. Hopes, confessions, worries have now slipped out through the windows to germinate or vanish in the sod outdoors. Are the smiles, the glows, the illuminations that haunt our home still stirring within our sometime visitors? A spring inside the older couch chuckles. |
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Napping in the Flavors
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I slid downhill into my Sunday nap, and there I was again, swimming in an aromatic alphabet soup where all words ran together into a flavor. If only poets could somehow write in immediate flavors, bypassing all those gangly, awkward letters spelling out unsavored, predigested words-- then what a banquet people might enjoy. But no, the poets have to keep on writing precious words about their bloodstained sunsets, their gold leaf autumns, their salty pepper, and I have no idea what other absurdities, just to jolt the taste buds on our jaded tongues away from neutral. So anyway, my nap-- I'm now awake, but have no splendid poems to bring back from my bliss. The soup there, by the way, was delicious. Make your own. |
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Keeping Here
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I wake to morning's window-filtered sounds and hear a cardinal outside my bedroom, daring to fill the early air with a questioning refrain: "Where's here? Where's here? Where's here?" An idea flashes brainward out of recent sleep as, having risen from my bed, I stand within a splash of sunlight on the carpet-- an idea taking on words: "How you feel is from what you do. To feel differently, do differently. Start here." I stand still in the light. "What changes shall I make?" I ask whoever's listening, outdoors or innerly. The same cardinal, broadcasting guru-like atop the neighbor's television tower, gives simple counsel three times again: "Keep here. Keep here. Keep here." Odd, but on the farm when I was young I used to shoot birds with my BB gun. |
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Looking Forward
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Long after I have laughed my last, corn husks will still flap and cackle yearly in the frosty wind. Hopeful farmers will plant and reap and worry through every weather. Statuesque cows will still moo and moan their mantras low like tubas in metal sheds incensed with daily hay. In select suburbs far from farms, ladies with airs will continue tinting and teasing their failing hair or flashing acquired fashionabilities into their lighted full-length mirrors-- ladies who will still ache at night for a gleaming knight between snorings of their well-off wimp. By then I will have poked this life's reapings and hopings up through my cranial chimney and passed beyond breath. With no nose to interfere, coffee may smell richer. Free of fumbling fingers, I may play Bach heaven-like on an unmolecular piano. Then, by and by and by, in my next soulbeat, I could emerge again from a provided womb, suck into baby lungs a deep inspiration, and cry within my new hell for a heaven of love and milk. I'm wondering now if, rather than burden my brain with all of this forward thought, I need to read a good mystery. |
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A Wiggy Sopsty
To a Reading by Alan Harris|
I falt a wiggy sopsty and clev a vagger gand; no swegler fad a seggy nor vindo sendy mand. When jigmer salgo vardy was tiggy varomund, then cladry falgarondo with pleggy fabripund. |
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Tree Choirs
To a Reading by Alan Harris|
High twigs in the trees-- do they croon nocturnal chords to you out of a winter-spring wind? Chords not merely for ears, perhaps, but chords filling human with being? Seasonally smitten with tingly new sap, each leeward-leaning trunk resigns helpless branches to the air, eerie groans waxing and waning as from a deep unknown just behind where you live. How do you feel? Try setting aside your daily newspaper and turning into nothing but ears to follow these pining strains. How far inside of you go those moans? Have they turned you inside out yet? No? Then listen all night, all night, all night. Listen all night, and waken. |
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Sentence
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Back of our house a lovable stray pooch, young and off-white with random black Mendelian punctuation, darts about and sniffs grassy clumps until, eyeing a soggy tennis ball wedged under the neighbor's fence, she plucks it up in her teeth and prances puppylike for attention as if mankind needs to please play ball (has she romped with children before being dumped out of their father's midnight-slinking car?), seeming ignorant or heedless that ball is not played where she is going to go-- by way of famishing jaunts through shrubby neighborhoods, altercations with kept cats and with collared mutts, a trusting ride in the dogcatcher's van, and a meager feast or two before the period at the end of her sentence. |
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An Old Man's Fancy
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Stepping through the front door into vernal flowerings, I sense a breeze of early manhood through my body-window. There was family then, so much family that we almost didn't want that much-- now just you and I and an occasional kiss. There were trembling bushes and thrilling winds. Internal landscapes tumbled over each other, vying for supremacy with surging colors. What landscape now? Same one as then, only someone drained the colors out of it. Now, living is sensible, good, right. Then, it was exploding with overfelt feelings. Young men march to any drummer they hear, while old men smile and tap on the table. |
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