Running for Your Life: “Instagram” poems

What’s hard is soft

In an urban

Space fingers

Taper to tap

Never ever awash

In head-butting spores

Boy staredowns

Fingers clench

In fists, strike

Face bone, nose

Cartilage, contours

Of what it used to mean

To be a man, soil-stirring *

Deep, gone, gone, gone

In an Instagram minute.

Miss Lonelyhearts

Can’t think of his name

The writer fleeing the East

Nathanael West, he says,

Can there be a darker

Story? What she wants,

Needs elude her,

Miss Lonelyhearts

Adam’s rib flung

At unmade bedclothes

Fierce and hollow eyes

Leave but a dull note

On me as a woman says to

Her friend-captive over

Barbecued kohlrabi

Gowanus-style:

“My DNA is on Instagram.”

* Yes, I meant soil not soul

Next: Running for Your Life: Open “The Door”

Running for Your Life: White Working Class Notes

Justin Gest’s book, “The White Working Class,” subtitled “What Everyone Needs to Know,” published by Oxford Press, is not to be missed. I’ve been reading an advance copy but it’s out in June.

Generally these nonfiction subtitles miss the mark by a million miles.

Not so here. Gest earns it by putting down a tightly researched, fluidly written argument, backed up with myriad charts and graphs (OK, so I’m not a big fan of the data overload), to explain just how we got to this particular moment in American political, social and economic history.

Russian meddling to get Trump elected? Ex-FBI Director Jim Comey’s weird-ass public announcements in 2016 regarding Hillary Clinton’s e-mail morass?

Life does not conform to the simple narratives that dominate most of our bookshelves and certainly clog the I’m-With-Stupid internet.

If you are looking to get a handle on just what the hell is going on, then do yourself a favor and read this book. Yep, it’s What Everyone Needs to Know.

Next: Running for Your Life: Open “The Door”

Running for Your Life: Old School Tech

I thought came to me Tuesday (April 10) while watching (without sound) the hours and hours of testimony before Congress of one 33-year-old American, Mark Zuckerberg.

Good for Zuckerberg, I thought, to do the right thing and answer the call as a responsible citizen and face questions about the code and conduct of his company, Facebook.

With the sound off, I imagined my own script.

How about a return to a personal technology that offers zero threat to democratic elections and would restore a community of informed citizens that even a wooden fella like Mark Zuckerberg could enjoy?

As in, books. You know, old school technology, the printing press. The magic that a book can be.

Something like, say, GATEWAY TO THE MOON, by Mary Morris https://amzn.to/2H8Ckr0.

Just a thought. To leave Silicon Valley for the Promised Land of books.

Let Mark and Co. trade that data.

Next: Running for Your Life: White Working Class Notes

Running for Your Life: Humbled by Humboldt

Canada Day comes early this year.

It is Sunday, April 8, the day “Canada” gathers in a town community center to honor the memory of now 15 young souls who were taken from our soil too soon.

Here in the United States, it’s common to mark out phenomena that suggests “Canada.”

Excess politesse, humor more prone to savage self than the other, beer runs across wilderness.

No moment, though, better characterizes the Canada I know than how humbled its people are by Humboldt, Saskatchewan. Where a recent highway tragedy took the lives of these youngsters, members of an ice hockey team.

Think of Humboldt, hometown of NHL great Glenn Hall of the Chicago Blackhawks, who against steep odds backstopped them to a Stanley Cup in 1961, as a place where a large stone is dropped in a pristine lake.

The ripples are the community centers, the ice rinks, where Canadians gather across the country winter after winter.

These ripples are magic. They range wide and deep. The accident that killed sons who played for the Humboldt Broncos junior hockey team is Canada’s tragedy.

It doesn’t just touch the country’s sports family, or its Saskatchewan family. But everyone who has ever skated on a backyard rink or watched a brother or sister do so. Who has entered a town’s “barn” and said, “Yeah, I get it. This is home.”

There is nothing cliché about this, a country, these shared experiences. We, as a country, are humbled by Humboldt, Saskatchewan. Noble and proud to forever truly feel a little of the loss of those who count themselves among the survivors.

Running for Your Life: Enter “The Gateway”

My wife Mary Morris, the literary force of nature, why indeed it’s Mother Nature (and Mother Time, for that matter, if we were to give the matter the thought it deserves and bestow titles accordingly), is proud to announce the launch of her next work of fiction:

“Gateway to the Moon,” a novel, and its official publication date is Tuesday, April 10.

The novel opens in northern New Mexico, where we are introduced to Miguel Torres. Okay, full disclosure, I love this kid. Five pages with him and you will too. A tour de force follows.

It’s a weird time right now. Lots of folks flailing … I wrote this Sunday, April 8, (we are a family of writers, alas) for a magazine column in the New York Post. It is a testament to how we are preoccupied with the political, the social, the chaos ….

“Over at Harper’s, Thomas Frank, of “What’s the Matter with Kansas: How Conservatives Won the Heart of America” notoriety, is waxing Cassandra-like with a cautionary tale for liberal democrats in the Age of Trump. The cover fits the tone of his piece perfectly, with a blissfully serene president floating above warring throngs of graying elites. His beef: folks upset with Trump, believing that a humanist savior, this time not Hillary Clinton but Special Counsel Bob Mueller, will rise from the ashes that is the current political scene and guide the righteous to the promised land of Democratic Party rule. Sorry, Frank says. If that’s the best the left can do, rather than fix the message for those poor people still waiting in Kansas (Frank published that book back in 2004) for an answer to their troubles, then yep, it’ll be four more years of Trump coming January 2021.”

We need, more than ever, novels like “Gateway to the Moon,” to restore our faith in great literature, to be in the hands of a master storyteller, to reorient ourselves, to remind ourselves, what is truly at the heart of the human soul.

Next: Running for Your Life: Humbled by Humboldt