MORE TO COME… later.. Probably
more to come someday
but verse comes in flash visions
fragments of imagination
more to come, (continuing excuse, since 1997 -epl)

Her, a woman of such exotic beauty, intelligence and value
Am I  in the lucky few to find someone worthy to woo?

But could she share me with my children,
Tolerate my forever goofiness,
And stand me when I am quiet or blue?

I suppose the cliché is that you risk the thorns to smell the rose
And to get where you want to go, you sometimes just follow the flow

It is just so hard to take it slow
Take it slow
Take it slow

I want to grab your hand in a crowd
Indavertanly,just keep up, but Feel
Flowing ions pulling me forward

I want to catch your scent in a room
And be carried away to a place of Sunshine

I want to innocently brush your hair out of your face
And find myself lost in the depth of your eyes

And most of all, I want to feel Love again.

12 Jan 2006 – epl

I live in a small world and she needs to live in a big one.

They are really the same world but in my version you make small subtle movements. Peace comes from a canoe in the middle of a lake, building things with your hands, and hammocks and porch swings. There are rules and set behaviors. You dress up for Mardi Gras and you dress down for work. It’s mostly black and white. You die trying to keep your word and promises. And because of that I will always think she was wrong to give up and leave.

But in her world there is a wide-open space that must be filled by collecting attention around you and spinning it until it’s a whirling dervish of activity. Movements are big and that’s what brings happiness. And that happiness is more important than any vow or self-sacrifice. I can visit that world but I can’t live in it.

17 Nov 2005, semi-poetic words I found while trying to understand the end of my marriage

dont freak out
i only want what i want
at least i did not ask you
to stay and love me back

you are gone
and i cant stop it
it doesnt matter to where you fly

i used to love you
i used to need you
now i can only grieve for you

but wish i could have you
just long enough to say goodbye

i dont want pain
i would not keep you
i would not ask you
to stay and love again

i will always know her
mother of my children
but i will always wonder
who you were

can you tell me
will you tell me
who did you become
or were you ever there

-10 Nov 2005, even though only you can really give yourself closure -epl

That is yours, This mine
Residue of thirteen years
What happened to Ours?

2 Nov 2005. I guess this is the sequel to the Us/Tombstone haiku

But even that takes a little sugar.

Birds flock to the sky
Pretty girls wearing wife-beaters
Startled by my stare

mid-Sept 2005, driving home from work – epl

i forgot my meds
can only think in haiku
concentration lost

some blurry day in 2005 – epl

Clutching the x9 and wishing he had something with a higher rate of fire or larger profile, even knowing his ammunition was down to only three darts anyway, he sighed.

He had reached Calcutta. Others made pilgrimages here, not for any spiritual quest but mainly to realize how much worse it could get. He did not like to come here though. It was, however, the safest way home.

So he crept past the half-sized cubicles, some of those doubled-up with workstations and equipment. During the day, agents, engineers and technical support representatives would be stacked into the cubes like sardines. Now, it was just the only route to the door that would by-pass the Soup-Pit.

The Soup-Pit, a more wretched hive of villainy and treachery one could not imagine. As home cube space to supervisors, mentors and coaches, the Soup-Pit had developed the reputation for being both a paradise and a place of danger.

As a haven for anyone seeking time off the phones, the Soup-Pit had attracted not only the truly creative but also the whiney. From here they dispensed 360-degree feedback, technical guidance and (shudder) quality initiatives. However, they also found enough project time to perfect the art of diorama building, rubber-band shooting and dart-gun collecting.

Which was more likely (alt: dangerous), feedback or a barrage of Nerf-brand projectiles, varied daily and by 30-minute interval. But the 15:00 shift overlap, with the resulting low occupancy rate, usually saw one or the other.

Tonight, The Pit was on the warpath. The CTI~ had gone down and no calls were routed into the call center. Management had decided to use the downtown to implement the latest Quality initiative. Accepting responsibility for the caller’s satisfaction with an outsourced and inferior product as a measure of success had not gone over well. When the switch finally came back up, and with a vengeance, the typical agent’s already low moral was crushed under the weight of 256 calls in queue.

Collectively they, the agents in real seats and real queues, decided to kill the messenger and began throwing insults and nasty stares at the Soup-Pit. Soon they were hurtling actual objects: paper balls consisting of incentive memos and HR hand-outs, the occasional headset, or even Happy Meal (r) toys.

Soon the Pit fought back. It did not help that they had recently found plans for a rapid fire Lego (r) machine gun . It was only a matter of time before mace, pepper-spray, and legal-in-Texas concealed handguns became involved.

Still, like you would expect in a middle-school game of capture the flag, reactions to lethality varied irrationally and most confused agents would still flinch away from a menacingly brandished Nerf(r) gun. So he still felt safe with his x9 and its three soft-tipped darts. But the stairwell was still a dozen cubes away…