Notes - on thoughts & "Take Two" (Bob & Me) / self-defecating humor

         Late morning. You are showing internal concern for your old friend Bob Pringle to the point you    are afraid to check your email.

         It is true, of course, but I would rather this remain private, Amorella. Quality of life is important, and at present his does not sound very good. Hopefully it will get better. This morning Carol suggested I drive up sometime next week and visit with him in the hospital. I would like to do that. Susan will be with Patti into Wednesday. She is still recovering from her foot surgery and is wearing a boot and crutch and has some sort of wheeled apparatus to put her knee on so it is easier to ‘walk’ distances. I need to check my email. Sometimes my imagination gets the better of me. Carol has been cheering me up by reading me the opinion section of the Cincinnati Enquirer from the dining room table (as she reads it). The opinions are better today and worth a laugh or two.

         You are over at Pinehill Park and have done your shaded north of the earthen dam walk while Carol completed the longer one. Chatted with neighbor Tim K. as he stopped his run for a few minutes. Cookie and ice tea at Kidd’s. Errands. Later, lunch at Smashburger on Cox Road across from the VOA Centre. Carol had a side of sweet potato fries and you had a side of veggie frites (asparagus spears, carrot sticks and green beans) with a dressing sauce on the side. You were surprised how good they were. Carol had her classic cheese burger and you had the Buckeye burger with fried pepper rings, haystack onions , pepperjack cheese, lettuce, tomato and mayo. Presently, you are waiting for Carol at Kroger’s on Tylersville across the street from VOA.

         I have checked online a couple of times. No word from Patti so I assume Bob is recovering. I hope so, as long as his quality of life improves to his satisfaction. Tense times (sometimes) when you and your friends are older. The longer I live the more of this kind of event I am going experience.

         You could do a short tribute to your continued friendship by enclosing a poem from each of you from your (both) so far unpublished chapbook of poems. (The chapbook was Bob’s idea.) – Amorella.

         Help me pick out two good ones that show our connection. We wrote these poems separately and with neither in mind, but as we read and reflected on them we could see the similarities to the point we can say we are ‘twin-minded’ when it comes to our perspectives and poetry. These are poems we chose over a parallel thirty-five year period in both of lives. Bob came up with the title page of the chapbook (below) and we put this together five to seven years ago.

         You have several options boy. I’ll sit back and watch you make the decisions first. There might be a lesson in this for you. – Amorella.

Title Page:

***

Take

Two!!

{Split/Personalities}

Richard Orndorff

and

Robert Pringle

***

LOVE  SEEN

                  An inner eye notes a yellowish, other-worldly glow

                           from pulsing earth’s hidden center store

                           where kindles the candle-fire

                           of my main man’s own unrecognized resurrection;

                  This sits itself in, while I, a generous and focused memory,

                           breakfast in the bedroom of your last scene smile

                  Elsewhere, yet nearby, sun-globed arid standing sky low

                           by love’s unwalled early morning mantle

                           the ayes of life heap shadows on the making stone,

                           a potter’s wheel in tight clayed feminine horizon;

                  Alone, I (without a proper cross to bear) love,

                           my still eyes step away strangely and forever unfree

                  Woods and coulds hug this rocky coastal silence

                           to hear my master's barking mind muse the buttered words

                  Memory bells clang and clash with interceptances ot a kiss --

                           thought and distance flow in from the mighty heartland,

                           leaving my main man cot, stretched out beside satisfaction,

                           snuggled in a land read in a white twenty year old truth,

                  Haunted, a break-fasting love smiles her bedded heart away

                  So, in the sync of slow angelic-like time,

                           eyes flow on a rubble of years  --

                  I, inside a memory inside, sense these photograbbic ayes

                           spying on the intimate together of our;

                  Daring, im-printing ayes, gathering and supping on sweet hopes

                           from the private dews of all lovers’ worldly snatching eyes

                  Flow-ering every two souls’ crooked riverbanks,

                           the lofty, scented theatres of unforgotten acts and dreams --

                  I sit inside and watch the slow sync of natural time,

                  I ponder and raise lifetimes for a love forever seen

***

BRANCHED SOULS

A Branched Soul sometimes

hangs naked like a March tree

as far as this existential earthly time goes --

its unnatural boughs shooting out dark twigs

in a sometimes pink to blue sunset.

A Branched Soul waiting for something like sudden death;

standing within waiting to be un-rooted from life.

While other, less selective, unused Somewhere Else souls

wait in God-let-us-be-silent orchard rows;

standing and waiting to be reborn in a kind of Spring --

waiting amongst an unworldly Lesser Farm of Angels tending;

souls waiting to nourish another crop of earthly heart-fruit;

standing to further a Far-Away Angel.

A Great Solitary Guardian Angel full of Winter and Hunger --

Waiting in Silence for the Will of God;

                                                            Waiting for a crop of Good Eating.       

                

***

         This took you a couple hours, orndorff. These two poems, possibly from the late 1980's, are fine; though they are not presented in the order of  the authors' names. One does follow the other as shown. Similarities I can markedly see in worded presentation and deviously shown within the white shading between the lines.  Post. – Amorella.

         Watched the national news and am attempting to relax my mind afterwards – too much politics for my old blood. It just makes me tired, solemn and more cynical than my birth. Wherever that last comment came from is beyond me. I stumbled on the, “than my own birth.” I would say it was    a Freudian slip but it doesn’t make sense. Perhaps I ‘misheard’ myself.

         It sounds like you were/are cynical at being born. – Amorella.

         It does have a ring of humor to it, my soul standing there waiting to pop into Life and thinking, “What good is this going to do? . . . Nothing. It is a silly waste of my soular time.”  So, why would such a thing pop into mind out of the blue, Amorella?

         It shows a profound sense of arrogance and hubris already established as well as a twisted sense of self-defecating humor to reasonably coat them both. Post, and call it a night, orndorff. – Amorella.