Was I not peering through the wide end of a spyglass / Into a world / That I needed to keep as far away as possible?

::::::::

I drove through the whole city
Can you imagine?
All the way through that horrible city
Just to get to my horrible job.
My car was a small rusty thing,
The bumper held up by a wire,
The windshield splattered with old bug-juice,
Smeared across my line of vision,
The pitiful wipers useless.
But what was windshield and what was lack of sleep?
My coffee was only just beginning
To kickstart my dream-besotted brain.
Was I not peering through the wide end of a spyglass
Into a world
That I needed to keep as far away as possible?
That was when he stopped me
Like a wasp
Even though I cannot explain
All these years later
How it was that I was able to keep living in a world
Where a wasp can stop you
Just to receive its sting,
I'm rolling down the window
And he's just inches away
All scrubbed clean and shaved and uniformed
As if for an inspection
And he's asking, "Do you know why I stopped you?"
"Ja" I say, in surprisingly perfect Hochdeutsch.
"Du bist ein Stuckchen Sheisse."
"What did you say to me?", he snapped.
"Nothing", I said.
I think that was some kind of tipping point for me.
I was 33.

(Article changed on Oct 08, 2023 at 8:38 AM EDT)

(Article changed on Oct 08, 2023 at 9:05 AM EDT)

(Article changed on Oct 08, 2023 at 5:35 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.