Zen Cognition: Far out poetry by various artists.

Tim speaks

2021-03-18T23:11:00.000-05:00

Listenin to OK Computer in the radio and trying to become like the rainbow of sounds Radiohead leads us to broadcast Love in the terrahterz band across the interstellar domain picked up in the subconscious by the Pineal gland deep inside your dark brain tissue ;ile two entangled lovers for afar

2021-03-04T05:47:00.000-06:00

ecology ebbs and flows like waves of heat reflecting off the moon.

getting back to minimalism

making it easier to do hard things

how long the bardo

2021-03-04T05:42:00.002-06:00

moms stay her return home and the death watch complete with more meds to ease the crossing

write about diffuculty and trouble?

images from

2021-03-04T05:36:00.000-06:00

Planetarium BY ADRIENNE RICH

Thinking of Caroline Herschel (1750—1848)
astronomer, sister of William; and others.

A woman in the shape of a monster

a monster in the shape of a woman

the skies are full of them

a woman ‘in the snow

among the Clocks and instruments

or measuring the ground with poles’

in her 98 years to discover

8 comets

she whom the moon ruled

like us

levitating into the night sky

riding the polished lenses

Galaxies of women, there

doing penance for impetuousness

ribs chilled

in those spaces of the mind

An eye,

‘virile, precise and absolutely certain’

from the mad webs of Uranusborg

encountering the NOVA

every impulse of light exploding

from the core

as life flies out of us

Tycho whispering at last

‘Let me not seem to have lived in vain’

What we see, we see

and seeing is changing

the light that shrivels a mountain

and leaves a man alive

Heartbeat of the pulsar

heart sweating through my body

The radio impulse

pouring in from Taurus

I am bombarded yet I stand

I have been standing all my life in the

direct path of a battery of signals

the most accurately transmitted most

untranslatable language in the universe

I am a galactic cloud so deep so invo-

luted that a light wave could take 15

years to travel through me And has

taken I am an instrument in the shape

of a woman trying to translate pulsations

into images for the relief of the body

and the reconstruction of the mind.

Adrienne Rich, "Planetarium" from Collected Poems: 1950-2012. Copyright © 2016 by The Adrienne Rich Literary Trust. Copyright © 1971 W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. Reprinted by permission of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc..

Source: The Fact of a Doorframe: Selected Poems 1950-2001 ( W. W. Norton and Company Inc., 2002 )

Please note: We strive to preserve the text formatting of poems over email, but certain email clients may distort how character indent, line wraps, and fonts appear.

2021-02-27T22:32:00.001-06:00

The thing is that I tried so hardy to love her goddess hips full of an sullied army of doctors and engineers

Rain #2

2021-02-27T13:07:00.002-06:00

You are Earth

Mother to the foothills and the

jagged peaks.

Water at the mountains

Snow colored passes

Until green rushes up the slopes

Awakening the giant of the Valleys

And of the coast

With water magical energy blue.

Fractional Dimention One

2021-02-25T20:24:00.025-06:00

No Im not going to the Dove again tonight. Chelsie is having trouble over a divorce. That is not anything I want to accidentally get involved. Just friends. And step back to a safe distance ma'am. So I'm not making this part up Lauren the Super One cashier was definitely flirtatious. She told me she was about to go home. I said mine is filthy and she agreed that her house must be even filthier (well, maybe I'm making that part up) I will look for her and get in her line again. My point is, everyone seems so horny and flirtatious at work and at home. I must just have sex on my mind. That's a beginning simple as a flower: ecology ebbs and flows like waves of heat reflecting off the moon.

Gonna make chicken ettoufe from a can when I get back from eye dr gonna shoot a laser beam into my rt eye! I will let you know how it goes.

My love life, I have been over empathizing with modern love. the doctor will look at my eyes and i think she looks at my soul. you see i think I wish she could. Skepticism alone holds back my clouding cataracts.

The world seems clear. think of radiohead.

Winter 2021 Snow and freezing temperatures for days

2021-02-18T21:20:00.005-06:00

Louisiana rarely gets snow. Even rarer than snow that melts the next day is a snowstorm like the one we had this week. of course bridges closed, even the steep hill by Byrd high school had two days closed/ I havent been going to work because of cold and freezing weather all days

Luckily I have a four wheel drive SUV that my sweet cousins in Portland bought for me. Its a four wheel drive and came in handy during this storm. I even did a narrated video of Creswell Avenue, and the small hill there on Olive St

https://photos.app.goo.gl/RHV5xWhBJ6WKuhtT9

my crazy accent

ice and snow

2021-01-15T22:32:00.004-06:00

searching the long lines

of builder living on scrap hills

left behind at their construction sites

Searching for the Truth

Among a valley full of

ice and snow

2021-01-12T16:08:00.002-06:00

Dec 21 2020. What a day for kisses and hugs, Terri took me to an ancient Indian earth mound near the Mississippi River

So now I'm making alaskan salmon with rigatoni and garlic tomato sauce. A little spinach salad and banana bread for desert. i'll take some photos.

It snowed but it was a dud and melted the next day. I drove around looking at dirty balls of snow stacked up to make a doomed attempt at springing too life. dirty sno0wballs be damned

THE ZEN OF Nth GRADE SUBSTITUTE TEACHERS b y Tim J Snell

2020-01-24T08:45:00.000-06:00

Nth grade is still there despite all the new technology like cell phones.
I'm kind of reminded of the scene in "I, Robot"
When Will Smith's character finds them all bunch together
while being stored in old box cars in a junkyard at night

All the students bunch together around their electronic devices
New rules are being reinforced every day --
But no Smartphones
Allowed in the classrooms.

At least that would be my classroom.

And now I'm trying to strike while the iron is hot
Trying to record what its like to be left in a
Room filled with Nth Graders
Who are strong enough to fight me

Over the girls and young women the claim
And sometimes I wonder who is in charge.
Does it have to be us or them?

I mean one young man in the classroom
Looked me right in the eye when I told him to sit down
And he just walked away back to the relatively quiet flock that had gathered
Around the smartphones costing hundreds of dollars each
(so I could not just throw their darn "radios" right against
The wall.

New short reminder notes in verse

2020-01-02T13:54:00.001-06:00

LOVE DRUNK
by tim j snell

And i was wrong, as usual those days.
two starry eyed lovers intoxicated
by towering intimacies before I fell
back down in it. (Kinda like a cloud -- trent reznor)

SATURDAY MORNING HAIR CUT
by tim j snell

Because I'm hooked up to the big machine
that keeps me alive.

the big machine is Nature
On its largest scale
Including all the far flung
Clusters of galaxies very different
From ours. All this still feeling the pulse

of creation.

䷪😎

I will work on editing this as the weeks go by.
I hope to make these two poems longer and more focused.

Mom in Colonial Oaks

2019-11-07T06:11:00.000-06:00

Most recently, she has a hand sized bruise on her arm. And x-ray showed a small fracture.

She originally went to hospital after a bad fall trying to get up and go to bathroom by herself at 11 pm with all the lights in the house were off. So she fell and an ambulance came to the house, picked her up off the floor and took her to the hospital. That was Aug 19 2019 and after the surgeries she still cannot walk on the replaced hip due to arthritis pain. She is 86 years old.

Summer Air

2019-07-19T09:14:00.000-05:00

Inside the windows fog over. I wonder:
Do the water droplets collect on the
Inside of the window glass or outside.

I sit and wonder this. Somewhere
Deep inside the radio speakers
Tinkles a piano. I turn up volume
And rollick to Pepe Romero's classical guitar.

Only the noisy cicadas
Outside the foggy windows.
Inside, the smell of fresh paint
and figs rotting in the wooden bowl by the window.

Everywhere mosquitoes, ubiquitous biting bugs
And even the bottled water tastes like iodine.

A new poem from a series

2019-07-15T10:39:00.000-05:00

I'm going to Henry's Place to cry
While I sip diet Coke in the dark
Alone in a crowd of shadows
between me and the internet
jukebox.

I like this short poem because it highlights my efforts to quit drinking beer in the dark with strangers. I like to get out of the house and hear live music and visit with friends. But yesterday I found myself writing this poem anyway. So there will be a series of similar rhymes rhythms, and relationships.

On fire

2015-09-07T17:04:00.000-05:00

Click click. :)

I am like "on fire" tonight. Really can't sleep. Lucky it is Saturday/Sunday. Oh well, so much for making it to church. I never make it to church anyway.

janlo surpreated furit compawere.

tired and not making any sense. Not code.

Old Seinfeld episodes are sunning through my head and I am amazed that Seinfeld is in the auto spell. I am amazed at a lot of things these days. I am so amazed I have eyes in the back of my head and remember my past life as a cave man.

This is all just a rouse. Afoot is the game of life
It ripples across time
Through the void

We are a node on a wave train
Bound for unknown destinations

And singing

ALP

2015-01-05T16:48:00.002-06:00

American Life in Poetry: Column 511

BY TED KOOSER, U.S. POET LAUREATE

Just as it was to me, Insha’Allah will be a new word to many of you, offered in this poem by Danusha Laméris, a Californian. It looks to me like one of those words that ought to get a lot of use.

Insha’Allah

I don’t know when it slipped into my speech

that soft word meaning, “if God wills it.”

Insha’Allah I will see you next summer.

The baby will come in spring, insha’Allah.

Insha’Allah this year we will have enough rain.

So many plans I’ve laid have unraveled

easily as braids beneath my mother’s quick fingers.

Every language must have a word for this. A word

our grandmothers uttered under their breath

as they pinned the whites, soaked in lemon,

hung them to dry in the sun, or peeled potatoes,

dropping the discarded skins into a bowl.

Our sons will return next month, insha’Allah.

Insha’Allah this war will end, soon. Insha’Allah

the rice will be enough to last through winter.

How lightly we learn to hold hope,

as if it were an animal that could turn around

and bite your hand. And still we carry it

the way a mother would, carefully,

from one day to the next.

American Life in Poetry is made possible by The Poetry Foundation (www.poetryfoundation.org), publisher ofPoetry magazine. It is also supported by the Department of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Poem copyright ©2014 by Danusha Laméris, from her recently released first book of poems, The Moons of August, Autumn House Press, 2014. Poem reprinted by Danusha Laméris and the publisher. Introduction copyright © 2014 by The Poetry Foundation. The introduction's author, Ted Kooser, served as United States Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 2004-2006. We do not accept unsolicited manuscripts.

An American Life In Poetry #502

2014-11-09T19:08:00.003-06:00

I attempted to read this poem at the Trapped Truth poetry group this afternoon. A technical error made its completion impossible as the last couple of lines were missing. Here is the poem in its entirety as promised.
~Tim

Many poets have attempted to describe the way in which flocks of birds fly, as if they were steered by a single consciousness. In the following poem, David Allan Evans gives us a new metaphor for the way light shows through the flying birds. Evans is Poet Laureate of South Dakota.

Sixty Years Later I Notice, Inside A Flock Of Blackbirds,

the Venetian blinds

I dusted off

for my mother on

Saturday mornings,

closing, opening them

with the pull cord a few

times just to watch the outside

universe keep blinking,

as the flock suddenly

rises from November stubble,

hovers a few seconds,

closing, opening,

blinking, before it tilts,

then vanishes over a hill.

American Life in Poetry is made possible by The Poetry Foundation (www.poetryfoundation.org), publisher of Poetry magazine. It is also supported by the Department of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Poem copyright ©2013 by David Allan Evans from his most recent book of poems, the Carnival, the Life, Settlement House, 2013. Poem reprinted by permission of David Allan Evans and the publisher. Introduction copyright © 2014 by The Poetry Foundation. The introduction's author, Ted Kooser, served as United States Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 2004-2006. We do not accept unsolicited manuscripts.

Rummage Sale by Jennifer Maier, who lives in Seattle

2014-10-12T13:03:00.004-05:00

Here is the first installment of an ongoing poetry collection ~Tim

I’d guess everybody reading this has felt the guilt of getting rid of belongings that meant more to somebody else than they did to you. Here’s a poem by Jennifer Maier, who lives in Seattle. Don’t call her up. All her stuff is gone.

Rummage Sale

Forgive me, Aunt Phyllis, for rejecting the cut

glass dishes—the odd set you gathered piece

by piece from thirteen boxes of Lux laundry soap.

Pardon me, eggbeater, for preferring the whisk;

and you, small ship in a bottle, for the diminutive

size of your ocean. Please don’t tell my mother,

hideous lamp, that the light you provided

was never enough. Domestic deities, do not be angry

that my counters are not white with flour;

no one is sorrier than I, iron skillet, for the heavy

longing for lightness directing my mortal hand.

And my apologies, to you, above all,

forsaken dresses, that sway from a rod between

ladders behind me, clicking your plastic tongues

at the girl you once made beautiful,

and the woman, with a hard heart and

softening body, who stands in the driveway

making change.

American Life in Poetry is made possible by The Poetry Foundation (www.poetryfoundation.org), publisher ofPoetry magazine. It is also supported by the Department of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Poem copyright ©2013 by Jennifer Maier from her most recent book of poems, Now, Now, University of Pittsburgh Press, 2013. Poem reprinted by permission of Jennifer Maier and the publisher. Introduction copyright © 2014 by The Poetry Foundation. The introduction's author, Ted Kooser, served as United States Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 2004-2006. We do not accept unsolicited manuscripts.

Got poem published in HenryHarbor.com

2014-07-11T21:39:00.001-05:00

What do you know? I got a poem published in HenryHarbor.com! It's the one you probably read before called "Quanta: A temporary lull in the painfulness of living.

Not much else going on today. Maybe tomorrow I will feel like writing more about what I have been up to lately. Remember to have a sense of humor, whatever that means....

Exploring Tricycle magazine

2014-06-21T13:13:00.001-05:00

http://www.tricycle.com/

The Poetry Foundation's Mailing List

2014-06-20T15:27:00.003-05:00

I just joined the Poetry Foundation's mailing list online. You can do the same by clicking here. I am anxiously awaiting what I hope will appear in my email and snail mail soon. I write a lot of things. Unfortunately, I don't read enough targeted material that fits my interests as often as I would like. Maybe this mailing list will help me, maybe it can help you too, if you join the list for yourself.

You might think I am about to submit all the things I have self-published on this blog for their review. You would be wrong. Unfortunately for me, previously published work, even the stuff on this blog and my other one thoughtshadows.blogspot.com, cannot be submitted for further publication. "What a bother!" you might exclaim.

Well, I see it as an opportunity and motivation to write more. Wish me luck if you would like to do so. And maybe you will see some of my work in Poetry magazine. Stranger things have happened, don't you agree? I am so excited....

Don't worry. I will still self publish comments and such things on this site. It's just that I feel I have a chance at magazine publication at some point, now. And I think I have been mis-targeting my ability to write creatively by making my otherwise marketable work available without compensation.

Cheers. There is plenty more where this stuff has been coming from.

The Indignation of self righteous counter-productivity

2014-05-20T07:19:00.001-05:00

Lately I am working on recognizing and avoiding self righteous indignation at work and leisure. I did not realize how often I suffer from such delusional thinking until Henry and, then later the same week, a co worker also used the phrase "self -righteous indignation." It gave me pause for thought and I wondered if that is what has been undermining myy career ambitions. Who knows?

The joke today was a decidedly African American joke. It is very simple: "Bye Felicia..." That's it. That's the whole joke. It is an inside joke based on a tv show or movie or something. I was too amused and distracted to ask exactly where the joke originated. But what made even me laugh is when a veteran employee heard us use the name Felicia and inquired in his deep voice, "Who's Felicia??"

We all laughed. You say "Bye Felicia" to someone apparently when you tire of listening to the babble on or gossip or whatever and he, the inquirer, is a notorious gossiper. You see how funny that is? Claro que puede!! Of course you do.

Just let the ethnicity of the joke slide right by and chuckle about this. Later I told the night manager, that in England the name Felicity is more common among caucasians than in the US and is based on the same Latin root word meaning "happy."

You know what she said? Yep. "Bye Felicia!"

Arghhh! A funny one liner for the late Spring 2014. What do you think? Did I tell this correctly enough to entertain?

How to live without attracting too much attention

2014-05-15T11:45:00.001-05:00

Leaving no trace upon the land
Universal harmony
Uncluttered mindfulness
Sleep takes to the dance of dreaming
Ideas pilfered from the other side of consciousness

they drop from my memory like falling stars
Are they not followed far to find the nighttime oasis within?
To see the galaxy of which we are part,
the Earth waters must be deep and still resolving its hazy details
And the moon is a much easier focus of nocturnal reflection

Tell them you saw the stars reflected in the water
We still romance the stillness of the night.

The dystopia phenomenon

2014-05-14T13:48:00.001-05:00

Why is the future so often portrayed as dystopian?

Coming down after years of riding the veils
Between the reality in the fractional dimentions in your mind.

You and I,whether we know it or not:
Trapped within childhood spells.
Wrapped up in the distractions from matters at hand
To feel the cosmic breeze and weightlessness of pretense.
To come down from this among people you knew, who are now
Older than you remembered; expected them to be:
Brings a tear to your eye. And you flee the company of old friends
To reconnect with the ghosts inside your head.