![\"verse](\"https:\/\/riverwriter.ca\/wordcurrents\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/01\/versesq-150x150.png\")
<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"[To be spoken]<\/p>\n
Hello, my name is Doug, and I’m an addict.<\/p>\n
My parents were to blame, because that day in 1937,
\nthey urged me to inhale slash exhale.
\nAnd, wouldn’t you know it, one inhale slash exhale,
\nand I was ever-lovin’ hard-rock hooked.<\/p>\n
Oxygen, first slash last my drug of choice:
\none sip, one deep inhale, and I couldn’t \u2014
\nresist slash stop.<\/p>\n
Dawn to oxygen-fueled dawn
\nI forged my days in dragon-tree’s fiery blasts
\nmy fading pewter helmet: testament to that orgy.
\n(For a while there was a chin-strap?)<\/p>\n
Painful side-effects slash cons include<\/p>\n
That the dawn-drawn sun \u2014\u00a0emerging from the molten river
\nlike a bronze eye staring at my noodling slash paranoia
\nthen sinking at day’s end behind royal rags of sky\u00a0\u2014
\nplays such painful mortal music in my core.<\/p>\n
And the terrible beauty of the silence cuts me:
\nin the rooms, after voices, giggles in the dark, fade away,
\nthen I can inhale the stark quintessence
\nof the beating heart of earth and hear the breath
\nthat hums over the strings of a spider’s cello.<\/p>\n
Perhaps in years to come (between bagpipe duets slash soliloquies)
\nsome of you will sit here listening to the silences.
\nSome will slash can not, but today, my friends and loves:
\ntoday I say life is a gas that drifts away:
\ninhale deeply slash exhale.<\/p>\n
July 15, 2017<\/p>\n
I wrote this to read at my 80th birthday party, but passed because I decided it was too something slash other for the occasion. #1152 Continue reading <\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"