telephone........................................................... ring

Ah, what a day.

I've been tracking 63 people that were discharged from Upper Shore Hospital when it closed because of budget cuts.

About twenty-five of these people have been incredibly hard to find.

Today I called a number I've tried a bunch of times before. A family member picked up and told me that the person I'm looking for is dead. He died last week of natural causes.

The average lifespan of someone with persistent, severe mental illness is twenty-five years shorter than a peer without mental illness.

Another father I spoke with said that he kicked his daughter out because she won't take her medicine. She is living in the car in the front yard.

FENCE contest

I placed as fellowship winner of the FENCE SLS contest. That means I wasn't in the top three, but I placed high enough to be granted a partial scholarship to attend the writing conferences in either Montreal, Kenya or

Lithuania.

You get one guess as to which program I'm going to attend.

The Lithuania program isn't until next year. It will celebrate the 100th birthday of Lithuanian born Milosz. I'm glad that it won't be for a while, even though it's hard to wait. I'll have time to save up.

What passive violence we allow (draft)

a strange humidity in the house--
a cat gut glutted with grass
i will permit this
stink and judgement
this etc of sounds
that all sound like
hello
an awful start I can only tell

you

that something is building,
not what, where
something that won't allow
me to loose the muscles
of my shoulders this is a quiet
poem, full of timid
things, like the belly hair I shave,

more, more, more, yeah yeah yeah
where's a cigarette

Unsaid!

"Scouts" is gonna be in the next issue of Unsaid! I can't tell you how excited I am about this. My hero, Anne Carson, has been published in Unsaid. It makes me giddy.

Thursday night, Friday night, Sunday night

A Mexican crow/hawk called a Caracara in front of a defused U-238 atom

A PET scan of the brain.

I am going to eat this

Broccoli Romanesco
ordered the seeds from Cooks Garden

Weekend, what weekend? I don't remember Friday. I think I feel asleep on the couch in front of the fire. Saturday I wrote and wrote. And painted the house. Sunday-- the reading! An awesome crowd of friends, wonderful support. Earlier I rode my bike for the first time this season. I got sunburned. Only nine miles-- but mostly hills. Then pruning the rose hips, deadheading the chicken and hens, bagging up leaves. Larisa Shepitko's The Ascent (glad Bigelow won for a war film)this wild Russian should have won in 1977, what's wrong with the Academy?


I cannot wait to start the growing.