How fickle fate doles out its random hand,
the faces of the cards down on the felt
unknown and spiteful of the best laid plans,
now little use once your lot has been dealt!

You work against the odds to make your play,
and with each round invest a greater sum;
with hope your only ally on the way,
an oracle who seems both deaf and dumb.

And then, by clever sleight or seeming chance,
a single card remains to seal your fate;
time slows each movement to a sluggish dance
as you see first a glimmer, then, too late,

a final pip is thrown to fill your hand,
destroying in an instant what wild dreams
of avarice you held. You understand
how fate works at that moment; and it seems

a bitter pill to swallow that such things
should be permitted by a loving God,
who gave the pendulum its cause to swing
and yet refused it any path but sod.

15 FEB 2006

Don't say a word; let the silence between us
deepen and swallow us whole;
forget who was in control,
who had the more meaningful role.

Don't say a word; let not speaking remind us
of what can be better unsaid;
better to not be misled,
or say something ill of the dead.

Besides, talking never was easy to do;
our love was a sentence cut off half way through,
each word like a weapon used only to prove
that I believed me, and that you believed you.

Nothing but silence is left to us now;
no need for explaining or wondering how
the things left unspoken worth talking about
weren't worth the time figuring out.

Don't make a sound; let the calm quiet take you
out beyond the reach of my voice;
you and I both made that choice,
opted for different noise.

Don't make a sound; even the slightest whisper
might shatter our reason tonight;
and keep us together in spite
of what we both know to be right.

Besides, all our talking has come to no good:
our love never grew up the way that it should,
but used words like weapons to tear us apart,
each comment a dagger in each other's heart.

Nothing but silence is left us to share;
no need for pretending to bother to care.
The things left unspoken we both didn't say
won't matter much after today.

09 FEB 2006

I am wondering over the furor caused by author James Frey and his memoir/novel A Million Little Pieces. Oprah's flip-flopping between the offensive and the defensive, class action suits are being filed ("I never would have bought the book if I'd known it was fiction") and pundits from every corner of the library are putting in their two cents.

And it makes me wonder ...

If a book changes your life, does it matter whether it's fact or fiction?

Are we so hooked on "reality"-based programming that we have marginalized storytellers? Must everything worth reading be the truth, and its facts verifiable? If so, there goes the Bible, and probably 90% of what's worth reading in the library.

Finally, and most damning I think to the whole debate: what autobiography, memoir, remembrance, biography or other so-called "true life chronicle" has NO falsehood in it? No embellishment of the truth, no creative reinterpretation of past events, no dramatizing perspective that is except in the eyes of the teller an obvious stretching of the cold, hard facts? I would lay even money that the celebrated self-absorbed scribblings of Benjamin Franklin, Henry David Thoreau, Henry Adams ... hell, even Samuel Pepys and St. Augustine ... were NOT completely historically accurate. Not everything happened the way these chroniclers tell it. Does that make their memoirs less impressive, less effective, less informative, less inspirational or cautionary, less memoir and more fiction? No.

Why is it that we never seem to focus on anything important for more than five minutes, and yet can spend weeks haggling over the most ridiculous things?

I think it's because we are always looking for someone ELSE to take personal responsibility, so we don't have to. We as a culture fight awareness and attention with every breath, conscious and subconscious.