The Rumble To Grind Me

Here is the original form I developed at the start of my blogging. I had found haiku sites. It is a Japanese haiku form, but it has more room in it. I don’t remember what it is called, but it was developed for sitting in teahouses and singing back and forth between competing poets. One of my favorite things is when I go to your site or you come here and we trade poems back and forth. This is a summer in upstate New York poem. The weather does get oppressive there, then the thunderhead builds and a rainy tantrum ensues. After that you get a day or two before it all builds again. I loved those storms. I was at West Point doing plebe summer in my seventeenth year on the planet, amazed at where I was, already knowing that I would not stay. I was simply too young.

That I left was good for me, I think. It was 1963. I would have graduated in 1967. Guess where I would have gone. I do not think I would have done well as a Lieutenant in Viet Nam at the age of twenty-one or two. Instead, in 1967 thru 1969 I was in East Pakistan, living with Mom and Dad, working at the Holy Family Hospital in Dacca as a Financial Secretary and paymaster. I was doing home study in philosophy and psychology, working hard on my guitar technique, teaching guitar, getting stoned on ganja and charras, making love with American girls, two of them but one at a time, and singing in a madrigal group that a Swede named Bengt Sjerblom started for the international community. As I returned home to California, I was carrying the Honorable Discharge that acquitted me of all further obligations to the US military. There is of course a bit more to that story. I have told it here before.

The Rumble To Grind Me

Hot light stabs my eye.
The first fat drop falls right here
on the front of me.

I ache for the downpour start,
for the rumble to grind me,

for the change of air
after all this oppression,
for you by my side.

June 19, 2009 12:48 PM