Dear potential violator of laws per copywriting,
While I appreciate the highlighting
of my writing even without crediting,
I would suggest some editing.

Give credit where credit is due, they say.
I’m not trying to make money or hay.
I just want a vote for what I wrote
whether or not you think one should take note.

Perhaps, I should take it as flatter
and I don’t know that it would even matter,
and, I understand it is the internet
and people follow what’s in one’s own interest best.

If it happened, I would have no control
over being an intellectual property victim
concerning what someone stole,
so it’s really all about an honor system.

On the right hand column
there is an imprimatur
and I might think that from copying,
readers would surely demur.

But, dear reader, there are those who
ignore the copyright,
lift an idea without attribution,
which, even purloined innocently,
is not very polite.

It’s such an easy thing to do —
this copying with proper citation.
Please, just write, “Old so and so – who knew –
could make such a brilliant presentation?”

The requisites of leadership:
ask, listen, thank, discern,
ruminate, germinate, affirm,
acknowledge, appreciate, learn
held up by integrity and compassion,
a foundation firm.

The present White House cabinet and
staff, after Trump’s requisite session
of fawning, hold the award for the
most negative adjectives: sycophantic,
obsequious, servile, subservient, defer-
ential, groveling, toadying, fawning,
flattering, ingratiating, cringing,
unctuous, slavish, smarmy, bootlicking —
sophisticated synonyms for the phrase
we learned in grade school — brown-
nosing. It took a fellow student to
explain the meaning to me in all its
vivid imagery. You probably don’t want
to hold that thought for too long in
reference to the president’s back-
side. It might be more pleasant to
think of the Cabinet and staff in
terms of smarmy. What a great word.
Unctuous. That’s another great one.
Oh, they are all terrific on their
own and especially in reference to
this crowd.

My father took the new
Macgregor baseball mitt
off the shelf
and said, “See if this is a fit.”
It fit like a glove
and as a twelve-year-old,
I was immediately in love.
“Let’s take it home
and work on it a bit.”
He rubbed neats foot oil
into the palm,
placed a baseball in the center
and wrapped a rubber band
around what then looked like a
huge, but beautiful, squished hand.
“Leave it for a few days.”
I mumbled, “I don’t know if I can
wait that long to put it on my hand.
I have a game tomorrow night.”
“Your old glove will be alright.”
Next day, I pulled the band off the glove
And slipped it on my hand.
The ball fell out and bounced on
the floor.
Fortunately, I just heard a snore.
A reprove never came.
I picked up the ball,
put it in the palm
replaced the band
so everything looked the same.
I used my old glove in the game.
and it worked just fine
so I had the new glove
till I was inducted to the Hall of Fame.
Then I heard my dad say,
“Son, all things in time.”

While he read a meditation
on the life of Francis of
Assisi, something fluttered
in his peripheral vision.
It was a moth, but said moth
fluttered on the inside
of the screen.

He read a poem where learning to swim was
the main metaphor, or — something else; he
did not know because his mind wandered way

back to his first YMCA experience as an
eight-year-old and he said to the instructor,
“I’ve got a sore stomach,” so he wouldn’t have

to go into the cold, deep water where Leviathan
lived. He shivered in the shower, got dressed
and went to the White Castle on the corner,

the stomach ache miraculously having disappeared.
On his way back to the YMCA where he would wait
for his father to pick him up, he tried to think

of what to say when asked about how the lesson
went. His mind jumped nine years to another YMCA
where he was taking classes for his Water Safety

Instructor’s certificate so he could get a summer
job as a lifeguard and to the seventeen-year-old
girl in a black tank-suit and how nicely it fit

around her bottom when she bent over, her back to
him and how nicely it fell away from her perky
breasts when she bent over while facing him and

how the firm nipples stood out against the wet suit
as she stood and looked directly into his eyes and
smiled. And you can understand why he wasn’t think-

ing of swimming as a metaphor or something else in
that exact moment when he was drowning in other
thoughts.

A map is magic.
You sit at a table
looking down at
the map and with-
out moving, you
travel in time and
space to a distant
place. The “ancient
myths and dreams,”**
the hopes and fears
are maps and magic
showing us the path
to follow to the
distant place and
time, which is here
with us now.

*idea from A Great Reckoning
by Louise Penny
** quote from a meditation by
Frederick Buechner

He was told that if you don’t say it,
you won’t have to apologize for it
and when he said it and had to
apologize for it, he was mockingly
told “Told you so,” but more often
than not, he told that which others
wouldn’t be so bold to have told
and which needed to be told and
now because he has embarrassed
himself again and has once again
been told, “Told you so,” he has
vowed to be quiet forever and ever,
amen. And then his wife in a voice
warm not cold and not at all a scold,
said, “I have taken a poll and you
need to continue to be bold, but
once in a while stuff it, so I
won’t have to hear your friends
say ‘I told you so.'”

When the two grieving disciples
encountered a person on the road to
Emmaus who later was revealed
to them as Jesus as he broke bread
and poured wine,

when the disciples came ashore
in darkness seeing an unidentified
person on shore who in the pre-
paration of breakfast for them
would be revealed as Jesus,

was it?

Of course, it was, because it was
you and I breaking bread, serving
wine and making breakfast for all
those whom Jesus loves.

If a sibilance sounds like leaking “ssss” in The Donald’s pants
and assonance sounds like “ass,”

if anatomical sounds like “anus,”
and gastronomical sound like “gas,”

then with ass, anus, gas and pants we have gotten
to the poetic bottom of White House leaking factssss.

However, if an onomatopoeia sounds like piss,
we may have bottomed out at Trump’s not so sweet tweets and shits.