Indie Author Now Free – In His Words

I have been a delivery driver, salesman, manager, business owner, soldier, drug dealer, addict, lecturer, preacher, Sunday school teacher, photographer, painter, poet, digital designer, mechanic, webmaster, reporter, newspaper editor, home owner, renter, homeless, poor, rich, and bankrupt.

I have walked barefoot in fields of horses, worn wingtips in marble halls, tasted cold water from a mountain stream, guzzled spirits at the tables of friends, slept alone on the cold ground of construction sites.

I have smelled like an onion, and walked like a duck, and once, even cleaned my house.

From the Amazon listing for his book Last Words:

Even trying to be as honest and whole as I can, only parts of me can be perceived by you. The best I can hope for is to be entertaining and in some macabre way, sincere.
But then, when did sincerity
ever make a thing true?
That part is up to you.

The last poem in his last published book, Without Anguish:

The Length and Depth of a Garden Sigh

Dawn comes like a gunshot through the trees,

light springs through trembling leaves of darkness.

Sun, the hill burner, is on his way from the stars as

birds ricochet through thickets, whistling for a way

of difference between endure and persevere.

,

I feel as drunk as chronic drifts of azaleas, walking

among bushed mountain laurel where, to

too many, I have become defined by symptoms;

they hover like catcher mitts around home plate

while I stagger and sway from the weight of age.

,

The grass is a soft file wearing me down

from ground up – a convincing to exhaust

my thickness upon earth while singing

my narrow psalms throughout the gardens.

Let no voice interrupt my soundless sound.

,

Pain is mine, not suffering, a little stayed by pills

flagging inflammations; but always the edge

of vertigo and fear of falling into flower beds

breaking the brittle bones of age into debris

of erosion with a fuselage of ‘How Are Yous.’

,

Do we, the humbled, ever regret or forget

our time as King of the Mountain, how

little it meant; how unimportant it became?

Does anyone remember laughter,

the difference between grin and grimace?

,

It is no one’s burden but mine to carry

the changing within the flesh cocoon –

What is linguistically possible to interpret

from this babbling devastation within –

and does it saying really matter?

,

Sometimes I snap at pain like an angry dog –

stand apart, a thorny Bush with a broke-stem rose

still holding on to a head of dreams, looking

for the guidance of fireflies through a dark garden,

still

not ready,

yet.

About

A Daoist Sketchbook

Remembering Bernard Fraley: “how to live among my brothers and sisters”