Daily Archives: April 2, 2011

CROSSING


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Image by hdzimmermann via Flickr

CROSSING

April 2, 2011

Copyright 2011 Gordon Kuhn

 

 

T’was a soft and loving summer’s night

that stood close and kissed a winter’s dawn

the warmth of long days had slowly cooled

and fall’s chill had painted pooled

a gift of basketless leaves and flowers strewn

to wither and then to dust to turn

beneath a bright and glowing autumn moon

as lengthening shadows upon the field began to loom

and creatures large and small

furred and feathered, short and tall

began to venture forth to creep into the room

while aged the world before me ran

yet t’was young and still spry as the new born fawn

that I spied one early sleepy morn

as it strutted and danced across my lawn

in love with life it jumped and pranced

while I crept as close as I could have chanced

then while embers from a fire close by

cracked and popped and began to lose their heat and die

I stood quiet as the soft tan creature passed

while in silence each found the other’s eye

and with gentleness we both touched the other’s face

and across its muzzle my fingers traced

while its warm short breaths my throat and face embraced

 

Why can’t people just hear or read the story.


I’m  a story teller. Yes. That is what I love to do. Tell stories. And to hell with English composition for sentence structure with a verb here, noun there, adjectives and adverbs all doing their parts to keep it nice and neat. But sometimes we need disorder in order for complex issues to be sorted out and the knots untied. My poetry comes from my heart but it is a story, friends, a story. I tell stories. God, I am so abysmally irritated with comments such as: you are definitely a tortured soul. I want to shout that I am like Popeye the Sailor: I am who I am.

Dammit.

I’m a writer, or a least I try.

I’m a poet. Okay, maybe I’m not because I break rules and do it my way. I sense the form and the emotion and I do it my way because I feel it that way. And I don’t view my writing as dark or morose. My writing is what it is, not confessional nor an attempt to self psychoanalyze.

I am what I am, a story teller.

IMPAIRED JOKE TELLERS


Logo of The New York Times.

Image via Wikipedia

It fascinates me how some people come to the conclusion that  because they disagree with someone else then that person must be illiterate, boneheaded, in need of hospitalization in a mental facility, or are just incompetent.

Take the article that was sent to me by a person recently who I believe can be classified as in the “sophomoric class” (explained later). The article was about incompetent people who think they are competent appeared in the New York Times January 18. 2000 in which can be found the following comment:

“There are many incompetent people in the world. Dr. David A. Dunning is haunted by the fear he might be one of them.

Dr. Dunning, a professor of psychology at Cornell, worries about this because, according to his research, most incompetent people do not know that they are incompetent.

On the contrary. People who do things badly, Dr. Dunning has found in studies conducted with a graduate student, Justin Kruger, are usually supremely confident of their abilities — more confident, in fact, than people who do things well.”

Hmmmm, very interesting, but there is more, especially about humor:

He says, essentially, that impaired joke tellers rate themselves as funny while everyone else knows they are incompetent.

Huh! Well waddya know about that. So, here’s the question are you one of the crowd? someone who has a limit, knows it, and keeps within those boundaries? If not how about an impaired joke teller. I think most of us are in that category and as before, it’s fine. Then we have the last category: Sophomoric.

The sophomoric individual takes the joke of someone else and addresses it with hidden sarcasm. Just enough to feel you’ve been hit with a brick but not hard enough to determine the direction it came from or what the purpose was. So, being incompetent, we wander through life quite content while the sophomoric individual either attacks again or finds another target but all the while is pleased to have determined that you are incompetent. So, to my sophomoric friend, and you know who you are, I say ….enjoy yourself, you are but a mosquito and should have realized the article, my friend, was written more about you than about me.