With my first sip of coffee, / Somewhat shamefully, / I snap in my metaphor filter.

::::::::

No more coffee filters
In a pinch I use a paper towel.

With my first sip of coffee,
Somewhat shamefully,
I snap in my metaphor filter.
Now everything is a metaphor.

But what a relief.

Soon I will know if there is a poem coming.
If this metaphor is for you.
I will know pretty soon
If it is to share.

My wife is upstairs.
Our marriage is a metaphor
That aligns us with the great conjoinments of creation -.
Sky and earth, meadow and forest, trees and wind.

Some of my filters filter out metaphors.
My filters keep me sane these days.
I have a "these days" filter these days.

I have a filter that filters out what I "should" be doing.

With this other filter I can see you very well.

With this filter I only hear you.
But what you are wearing is blurry.

With this filter the world is ending.

With this filter we have a chance.

With this filter I am dancing with you, the two step.

With this filter I can barely remember your name.

Is it Sandy?

Here is my vegan filter.

And here is my kind, hopeful, traveling for the summer filter.
My default filter is my climate change filter.
(Leave me alone.
You don't understand.
It's all over.
What's the point?
Who wants to live in a world of mass extinctions?)

Here is the curry stir-fry filter.

Here is the one where all my childhood memories are good.
When is dinner ready?
Mom: Keep playing.
(We are playing "Steal the flag".)
She reassures me: I will ring the bell.
I love steal the flag almost as much as blueberry slump,
My mother's specialty.
There is the bell.
We can hear it across the field.
I start running,
Dodging writing spiders who spin their webs
Across the straightest path to the house
Where my mother will remind me to wash my hands.

This is my I'm old filter.
We are old.
Our ideologies are old.
Our filters are old.
There is no proof
Of our playing steal the flag
Because there were no adults with cameras.
How sad, because that was when we were happiest.
When being young was everything
And perfect.
Being old is everything
And imperfect.
We are still playing
Steal the flag.
When someone wins
We start again.
We will play until the world ends.
There is no bell.
No call to dinner.
We just play
And play
Waiting for the world to end.

(Article changed on Aug 02, 2022 at 1:51 PM EDT)

(Article changed on Aug 02, 2022 at 3:46 PM EDT)

(Article changed on Aug 02, 2022 at 4:41 PM EDT)

(Article changed on Aug 03, 2022 at 8:46 AM EDT)

(Article changed on Aug 03, 2022 at 2:13 PM EDT)

Authors Website: https://garylindorff.wordpress.com

Authors Bio:

Gary Lindorff is a poet, writer, blogger and author of five nonfiction books, three collections of poetry, "Children to the Mountain", "The Last recurrent Dream" (Two Plum Press), "Conversations with Poetry (coauthored with Tom Cowan), and a memoir, "Finding Myself in Time: Facing the Music". Lindorff calls himself an activist poet, channeling his activism through poetic voice. He also writes with other voices in other poetic styles: ecstatic, experimental and performance and a new genre, sand-blasted poems where he randomly picks sentence fragments from books drawn from his library, lists them, divides them into stanzas and looks for patterns. Sand-blasted poems are meant to be performed aloud with musical accompaniment.


He is a practicing dream worker(with a strong, Jungian background) and a shamanic practitioner. His shamanic work is continually deepening his partnership with the land. This work can assume many forms, solo and communal, among them: prayer, vision questing, ritual sweating, and sharing stories by the fire. He is a born-pacifist and attempts to walk the path of non-violence believing that no war is necessary or inevitable.