so on leap day i'm actually thinking about leap second, which was supposed to kick in maybe 2020, i'm not sure, but it was in the news a couple of months ago when my news class started, and we caught it for just a day or two. seems all these scientists got together, and the americans and some of the high-tech people were pointing out that adjusting the world's clocks, digitalized as they are, would be an enormous hassle when that leap second kicked in, and would be like y2k, it would shut all the computers and make them unfunctioning, and what was the point of that leap second if you only had one every couple hundred years or so. we could go a few go-rounds without it, and nobody would know the difference, and we'd all go our merry way.

but the leap second had its defenders, and pretty soon, the only thing they could agree on was to postpone the decision to the next great meeting of scientists, which they did, so now the leap second's fate hangs in the balance, it's out there, it might happen, or it might not.

my wife wrote this book on stalking, and academic book, but i am to read it because this one producer called her and wanted her to make a movie out of it. and she agreed, and wrote a screen play, and he liked the idea, and has given us a green light. i could be in the screenwriting business pretty soon here. and i was just getting used to the poetry idea. but hey, you take what you can get.

and we go rolling into march, tornado season, last night, about 4:30 am, we all went down in the shelter, the four of us, and sat there until we knew the tornado had passed, but the little boys never did get back to sleep, and neither did i, and here i am even now. turns out the tornado wiped out the saline county town of harrisburg, a place that i'm especially attached to, about two towns over. i don't know so many people there though i do remember a saline county trial where i sat on a jury and saw a long line of saline county emergency and medical personnel. they're out there now; six died in the tornado, they say, and it wasn't all that big of a town to begin with. two towns over from here, on the road that cuts right through southern illinois. one wonders why these tornados just choose to roost where they do. what's up with that? not sure, but it doesn't matter. i'm turning in, see if i can get some sleep, before that whole circus starts up again...

at times it seems like this small town can be hopping, it might be the trains, or just the convergence of lots of things on a single friday night, but tonight for example i'm driving my bandmate around listening to african music and she points out all the planets in line, up above a sliver moon, right above town, i'd have seen them and not even known which planets, or even that they were planets.

it's been stray dog holiday all over town all week, this is a long tradition in illinois, where, when they first announced presidents' day, back when i was a kid, illinois didn't want to give up abe's day, and wouldn't give up abe's day, so nobody knew when to put out their garbage, abe's day or presidents' day, and the garbage would stay out an extra day on both days, or the trucks would come by and have nothing to pick up, whatever, lots of extra garbage for the stray dogs. and finally nobody could relate to presidents' day either, it wasn't like we were slighting george, or abe, or either one, when we simply traded it away for king day, or maybe vet's day, or something that seemed more urgent at the time. so voila, another stray dog holiday...

i'm playing african music as i drive around town and that's good because it's lively with an interesting beat and the town is looking bleak, and brown, and all the windows are shut and everyone's in a hurry & tired of being out of money and driving quite poorly. a lively beat that's getting livelier will at least keep the kids at bay for a minute, much better than say a semi full of squealing pigs, and give us all a lift for the school days ahead. patience is wearing thin on the school front. kids are wishing they could just move on to the next grade. i'm wishing there was a next grade.

the poetry reading was a success, and that's not just because it raised some money, but also because increasing identity as a poet has given me a kind of celebrity and people not only liked the book but also said they wanted more as they knew people who would like them, etc., which meant it had some popularity, a little jump, at least in my own tiny community. made me want to print more, eliminate the typo & mistakes, get the cover right, etc. and do it fast; orders are coming in. the pressure's on. all of a sudden, i need to have a few of them around. brings up the next dilemma; i have about a hundred more. should i make e pluribus 2012 with those hundred, or just reprint what i've got, and make a bigger, expanded e pluribus later? i'm impatient; i'm leaning toward the 2012 version soon. 100 more is hard not to just put out there, and call it the best i've got for the moment. about 670 of them, a fair collection.

all the sites need overhauls; i need a publicity stunt; i need lots of web pointers going to my site and then for example to go out there and raise some ruckus to point people to it. for example you can go out on haiku street (#haiku), the most pedestrian of places, but with a wide variety of different poets putting it out there, and i feel kind of silly, because i still don't even have a picture on my poet twitter, and no followers, no followees, no nothing, but i write haiku and go out on the #haiku street, and it's kind of like see & be seen, write haiku about whatever, and let it sit there. i open up these news articles & write haiku from them, it's like capturing a moment out there in news land. but my twitter has no face, it goes nowhere, it's just an empty shell putting haiku out into the wind. organize! time for the dance.

the one i'm most inspired to do is entirely about this small town, with every little business, every park, every corner represented, every turn of the weather, every day of budding flowers, every recognizable thing. the street curb where everyone eats ice cream, the liquor store, you name it. i named this one a few years ago, boxcars on walnut, even gave it a website, then let the site turn into pictures and links as the haiku moved on to other places.

rushed home tonight to skype the granddaughter and there she was, speaking whole sentences and telling her mom about what she saw and what she wanted. it's like having an extended family, being able to see them and talk to them almost any time yet not exactly living with them. they are a constant presence, in that i can skype them so often and actually miss them if i don't, for a few days in a row. it's wild, it's a new paradigm. a new kind of family life. they might move to georgia, that would be something, but who knows? anything could happen. it's good to see them now...

whopper of a cold came through this week and i got it maybe monday, still had it on thursday when my wife got it even worse, and said, you take the kids, get 'em up, feed 'em, dress 'em, get 'em off to school. i did 'cause i could, i teach even when i'm sick, i go to school no matter what, even if i'm about to drop over dead. i was pushing it a little there toward the end. almost keeled over. it's the way it goes.

my poet twitter is @ramblintom, check it out. my normal one is @tlev. sometimes i tweet on one, retweet on the other. i actually don't get up there much. but i've figured out, if you have something, you have to get out there and say it. not much point in letting it just sit there....

chao

new story:
Redial...
enjoy! comments welcome as usual...

i have a blog where i put poetry stuff, and another blog where i put carbondale stuff, but the poetry reading last night, which had its own blog too, was really a convergence of all those different aspects of my life and really belongs here because this is where i ramble and bring it all together. i originally got two other poets besides myself, so that there were two out of three of us from cesl, and two out of three of us quakers, but the quakers were the more loyal of the lot at at the beginning, out of the eighteen people there maybe ten were quakers. three or four more were from cesl and then a few more showed up too including my two older sons. the lead poet was home with a newborn baby but another cesl teacher read for him and when it got to my turn i talked a little about haiku and belted out some of my favorites from my collection which as it turns out was really my time to tell my town about my travels which now were about 38 years ago. here i'd held it in all that time, raised a family, some people knew about it, but, i'd never put it out there and said, this is what i did when i was nineteen, guatemala to alaska, about a year on the road, 1974 to be exact. and then iowa took the brunt of my rough landing so iowa was well represented in there also.

it's cold out still but it's been raining a lot and believe it or not some flowers are beginning to poke up through the cold ground. as i got ready i noticed how haiku had made me always aware of the natural world and whatever we know as the seasons; here it's still february, but winter is really loosening its grip and even though valentines and abe day and those february things could be considered winter, according to the calendar, around here they could be associated with the first nice days when you see those shoots and begin to realize the worst is over, spring is really about to pop. international festival, with its food, and chinese new year, with its spring symbolism, and this other stuff comes along too, but here we were in the back room of a coffeehouse belting out poetry and it was actually kind of fun.

then in kathy cotton's set she invited a friend from the performance poetry crowd, a woman who got right into her poem about those tigers in ohio that were involved in that situation in the news a while back. some guy had collected a whole crowd of tigers, maybe 1% of the total number of tigers on this earth, but then he committed suicide or something and let the tigers loose, and it being rural ohio and all, the authorities ended up killing most of them though they certainly didn't enjoy it. i may have gotten some of the details wrong here but the woman got kind of into it and didn't think highly of the 'public safety' that was the cause of their deaths, and especially got wound around the idea of 1% until she sounded like an occupy kid and i wondered, what happened to those occupiers anyway? and she's going 1%! 1%! theatrically, bringing in those performance poetry skills. performance poetry is big these days and i really enjoyed this, it's like watching rap, you realize there's a lot you can do with everyone's attention, once you direct it successfully upon yourself. not that i would ever try such a thing.

i got a little embarrassed, going back and dredging through my book, and finding a few typos and repeated poems, and ones that were too true to life, or said stuff i really didn't want to say. i've got my work cut out for me, as i make it a little bigger and do the research to fill in the gaps. i brought out all my angst about the haiku itself: how the haiku community has rejected 5-7-5, almost universally, but i haven't; how i want it to fit together as a body but don't know exactly how that will look (right now they're alphabetical, alabama first, and boy that's a bit of a push, going straight into alabama and from there to alaska, arizona and arkansas...california is still on that first page too, but connecticut has been pushed off by my little poster advertisement for the reading itself, so i could conceivably make that first page include whatever i wanted, and force people to delve in to really get it all). i'm talking the web version here, which has typos of its own and dead links and needs a little work too. getting it all into the light of day was, overall, quite good for me, but i'm now thinking, hustle & i can get another version out pretty quick here, one that would have more of the newer, better stuff.

that's assuming it's getting better and not spiraling downward into the muddled fuzzy golden memory of a guy who's way too busy and ever farther from the moments that actually made up that journey. it's another thing i learned, and my son told me later about having to go back to work immediately, and crossing the train tracks in front of a train so i reprimanded him about the inherent danger of stepping by those rails at night right in front of a train that can't or won't stop if you happen to get stuck. but he's nineteen, fortunately respectful and taking my advice but almost certainly not following it. one of the things i said as i belted out my train set was, they're always going faster than they look, they're actually quite dangerous, and it was a love holiday & people had love poems, but i loved trains so i had train poems.

actually it was the day after valentines day, a day in which americans spend what, three billion, but fortunately they had three hundred for the homeless which i duly scooped up and set aside to take it over there sometime as soon as possible. it included one money order for a hundred dollars by itself. a good donation to the shelter in a way feeds the ghost that follows me and reminds me how that sense of out there-ness which is like my shadow, it turns when i turn, it recedes in the dark when i curl up and try to get some sleep, it's really not so bad in this small town where i know everyone, and actually have very little chance of having to call on that shelter again. but when i go down there, to talk to the guy who runs it or whatever, i catch a glimpse of some of the people who are sucked up into the vicious-cycle treadmill: no job, no car, no life, no hope, homeless-shelter soup and you have to wait to get it, and in fact, register with the government. it's scary. but three hundred ought to be able to buy them a dinner or two and it was successful enough to get me thinking of doing it again. next year. with more of that tiger-like performance stuff, or maybe just more and/or different stuff in general, at least on my part.

to see what works and what doesn't, that's haiku, you get these moments, and sometimes some of the moments reach some of the people some of the time. i try to keep track. some of course have special meaning but only to me, the general public has no clue. rout out the inside jokes, the cliches & the stereotypes. though i must say, there were a few of those out there, at the same time i was.

new story: Five-second rule...enjoy! comments welcome, as usual