by Wanda Morrow Clevenger
those grub jobs
and crud bosses
weren’t more
than a high school grad
could expect
but
I got to dress up
and show my legs
and buy
my own beers
and
tell myself I was
on the way
up
somewhere
and really
they were
all of them
all of it
disposable
a layover
until
I was somewhere
else where
someone else
bought
the beers
Sunday, February 2, 2014
Life in a Word
by Patricia Williams
Stage I
Look at the word, lust, take an unvarnished view: craving, desire, an inordinate appetite, burning fire, a yearning for more than required, an itch that needs persistent scratching. To lust after, to covet, to want, predisposes one, to others of the Deadly Seven, like envy, greed, and gluttony. Lusty sex sins, attributed to mental disorder or concern unbuckled, committed by Hollywood types and alike by pious clerics sniffing perfume mixed with the scent of baby powder, generate psychological thoughts: how magnetic draw fades quickly, how sex without love just makes you sad.
Stage II
A word that defines a form of decay, rust, freezes motion, emotion, is a scale formed from disuse, a condition of oxidation, limitation: observe the person whose pinnacle occurred at age eight on the stage of the Original Amateur Hour. Rusted-shut is rigidity, inflexible and barren, neglect over time, a bureaucratic universe with cliché-filled dialogue, wordplay, and nonsense, byzantine utterances from pale-faced scholars. Find rust in cast-off devices, disintegration, waste from civilized living, corruption, tarnish, decomposition, politicians rusted in place, producing parodies of democracy.
Stage III
When examining dust, a word implying powder, dirt, earth, grime, think Dust Bowl with choking billows of dust that muddied the sky, black blizzards with soil turned to dust. Think loess: pale yellow, buff-color, dusty soil cover, fine particles, ground and pulverized, silt-sized sediment deposited by wind-blown dust. Dust-replacing-the-sea speaks of upheaval, great change, the passage of time, see the dusty world in a grain of sand. Ash, dusty residue, recaps cremains, ashes-to-ashes, dust-to-dust, all that remains. Blow away, fade away, dissolve, dissipate, scatter; dry and bitter dust.
Stage I
Look at the word, lust, take an unvarnished view: craving, desire, an inordinate appetite, burning fire, a yearning for more than required, an itch that needs persistent scratching. To lust after, to covet, to want, predisposes one, to others of the Deadly Seven, like envy, greed, and gluttony. Lusty sex sins, attributed to mental disorder or concern unbuckled, committed by Hollywood types and alike by pious clerics sniffing perfume mixed with the scent of baby powder, generate psychological thoughts: how magnetic draw fades quickly, how sex without love just makes you sad.
Stage II
A word that defines a form of decay, rust, freezes motion, emotion, is a scale formed from disuse, a condition of oxidation, limitation: observe the person whose pinnacle occurred at age eight on the stage of the Original Amateur Hour. Rusted-shut is rigidity, inflexible and barren, neglect over time, a bureaucratic universe with cliché-filled dialogue, wordplay, and nonsense, byzantine utterances from pale-faced scholars. Find rust in cast-off devices, disintegration, waste from civilized living, corruption, tarnish, decomposition, politicians rusted in place, producing parodies of democracy.
Stage III
When examining dust, a word implying powder, dirt, earth, grime, think Dust Bowl with choking billows of dust that muddied the sky, black blizzards with soil turned to dust. Think loess: pale yellow, buff-color, dusty soil cover, fine particles, ground and pulverized, silt-sized sediment deposited by wind-blown dust. Dust-replacing-the-sea speaks of upheaval, great change, the passage of time, see the dusty world in a grain of sand. Ash, dusty residue, recaps cremains, ashes-to-ashes, dust-to-dust, all that remains. Blow away, fade away, dissolve, dissipate, scatter; dry and bitter dust.
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