For Thankful Cranks
Some Thanksgiving Poems larry goodell
a duende offering po box 571 placitas, new mexico larrynewmex@gmail.com
For Thankful Cranks
Just Breath . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 Create-A-Hymn . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 Tough Turkey . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7 Red White and Blue and Rainbow Too . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8 Cheated . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9 Morning, Day After Thanksgiving, 2001 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10 For Thankful Cranks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11 Gratitude Toot . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12 Happy Dumb Turkey Day. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13 Feasts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14 Heavenly Blessed Earth . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15 Walking Out . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16 Day Before Thanksgiving 2020. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17
Just Breath 1. Count your blessings become a gratitude freak. Be thankful for everything Left & Right Up Down & Center. Especially for the fact that You are breathing. 2. Especially for the fact that You are breathing in and out and now getting up from this chair & walking step by step out the door with the laundry to, in this Spring-blooming weather, hang the laundry up on the clothesline to dry just like my Mamaw did every Monday morning down in Roswell where I took my first breath.
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The Tao of Grace Thank a saving given green to come up being harvested late in the scene. Put up, froze, dried till mixed with fresh eaten. Thanks agriculture getting even with the mean The angry gone down the tubes of yams, potatoes, green beans peas, salad greens corn wheat rice, carrots onion, nuts celery, garlic oats everything amidst the bird, the turkey platter It’s hard to be angry if you thank the food for being what it is. Thanks to the food the bird and all the rest Thanks to everything growing with the rest Without you, there is no me. No us. Without us there is little of you so you are bigger than us thanks to the crops, the creeps & the crushed cranberries thanks for the hope that got sparked between us.
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Grace. Grace says Grace. Thanks for the plants & you & us. You have no face. You certainly are a benefit to the human race as it races towards extinction. Glad we knew you bird trimmings, greens, veggies high powered cooking herbs & spices of the mind. Glad to meet you eat you along our annual way. Thank a saving given in. Thanksgiving in. Thanks giving in. /23Nov95
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Create-A-Hymn The aim is not to blame but to create the same love that created the world volatile powerful sustaining beautiful and fierce beyond vision, gentle and retiring as the womb working to create everything good above us below us behind us everything good created in life parading forth pleasure in the slowly evolving round and dance of the planet the planets blessed ourselves, myself now everything good above me below me behind me around me beside me within me the aim is to aim at the center of myself, no blame creating in rest in strength of heart muscles pumping and brain relaxing into early morning dawning life love mystery of the Unknown reveals itself in purely being, breathing great gratefulness everything sings the sun up okay better than okay alright! Dawning brother, sister father mother 4
partner friend end no end imaginary partner real God mindfulness, full body sings in heart the art of love the gift of grace the beautiful fragrant bower of the personal Higher Power ascends, descends Father Sun Mother Earth Great Spirit gives birth every moment to this surprise of friendship and love, this sun slowly up and brightening hills behind me as I not seeing love more that it’s there– the growing evidence of all the light when I can’t see the source nor would I want to or could I in this peace flowing down everything good above me, below me, behind me around me, beside me within me the aim is not to blame but to open to the love that creates the world.
/26Nov98 5
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Tough Turkey (Thanks to Procrastination) (Dessie Goodell–Grandma born July 25, 1889)
Tom Turkey totaled. Or maybe he wasn’t Tom. Dick Turkey done in. Too old to be good. Now roasted. Maybe I’ll make turkey soup tomorrow lots of it. A 22 pound turkey a year & a half old. After gutting 15 pounds. I’m telling you, guts make up a lot of us. Joel cut the head off as I held him. Axe sharpened. My little folding Gerber knife sharpened. Water boiling in the big galvanized tub. Dipped him in heavy as he was he floated. Took out feathers, for hours. I have my procrastination to thank for this tough turkey. Putting it off getting someone to help me. Well when I’m dying and I haven’t gotten around to that big task it’ll be too late. Maybe I’ll join the turkey in the sky, or in some deep canyon where his repeated gobble and my self-pitying sighs will amuse the coyotes and fall on deaf ears of the dry river bed.
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Red White and Blue and Rainbow Too As America stretches into showing its true brown-shirt colors in November, Thanksgiving and dread the election might be rigged with multi-billions going into secret manipulations to favor the fascistic source, I’m stripped of every option but my one vote as minute as it seems it’s all I have left, anyone has left, so cast it carefully, I remind myself. Everyone red white and blue and every color of the rainbow must vote to see where we really stand, what kind of country we are living in, proving we are many more colors than one or, we will become a nation of brown shirts, a nation totally screwed. /19jun2012
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Cheated God help me please throw the weight of loss off me that form of being cheated that haunts me who cheated us and caused all this fuss & dark worry that we can’t even have a birthday & pretend things as normal. Just to be able to enjoy giving without thinking you’re indulging someone who doesn’t deserve it. Just to be able to sit down at a table and enjoy Thanksgiving or a dinner together, on occasion or anything without this constant worry and feeling we’re been cheated out of this reality that comes with right living. Just a simple birthday, a dinner together a semblance of family. Who took it from us? Why can’t we live? What did we do, wrong?
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Morning, Day After Thanksgiving, 2001
The flower of light opens where last discovered as trying, ignorantly, I can’t find it. Even any sense of its fragrance. So I light a stick of incense and pretend I have its presence like all those who tell me they love this delicate spiritual essence this glow that maintains such power this more than anything this more than a flower. No word is enough. I’m permanently lost in pretense. But go on and sit, enjoy the incense. Breathe it in with the air my life depends on.
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For Thankful Cranks Am I thankful, prankful, frank? Or am I merely a crank. What turns me on, or rather what turns me around? am I a clown without the makeup? Am I a member of a secret society that has clan powers, respect in the lower community? And you don’t know about it obviously is that where my power comes from? What power. Confession of a confused member of society, reluctant member. Not a member a recluse cracking jokes & listening to cosmic slips between episodes of deep despair. The other side of night is what more night, or day? Day day day day one, dancing around with the paraphernalia of auras spikes & zigzags, bands, layers ever upward piercing out I hit my brain into heaven and heaven wasn’t there to receive it. “Ahoy down there, there’s no one up here, it’s very uncomfortable living I’m sending this brain-thing down, when it gets there don’t be surprised if half of it is gone.” Now I sit here with what brain I have miraculously restored. Imagination covers all errors, don’t worry everything will be perfect in the realm of the imagination. Fantasize who you are and you well may be thankful, prankful, frank. /Thanksgiving 06 11
Gratitude Toot If I feel gratitude what is that? Great, greet, grit a release, dizziness, a pleasure tears come to the eyes standing I almost fall over thankful to be in everything at once or just my humble self for once awake, aware, alive, just one, of many, many great are the grateful and true to themselves. Am I one? I work at it other times and greet it when it comes, just a swoosh! Thanks.
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Happy Dumb Turkey Day I am so grateful for the hate-filled dialogue of America the constant saber-rattling and the depositing of fear everywhere like huge piles of shit that stink up the airwaves no matter where you go I am so grateful for our government’s half-assed leaders with their pact to take over the world and kiss each other’s royal ass endlessly so we don’t have to bother with anything but destitution growing. I’m so grateful for a war to control the Middle East & teach them a lesson that we are the rightful Christian leaders and we need to be bowed down to. I’m so grateful for the giant piss-assed fantasy of domination & triumph that our leaders bolster while the world goes to hell and the Earth warms up for the next universal disaster. Yes I’m grateful the infrastructure our highways & our schools our air & our forests, our water and our health care all so prominent near the bottom of the world-wide list. I’m grateful for the upper 1%, those billionaire Americans who rule much of the world and have our interests at heart. I’m grateful for the anti-intellectual bent of America the dumbing down down down of my country and the fascination with celebrity and wonderful plastic surgery that excludes old age. Oh thank you dumb country for the right to live in a world free of habeas corpus. Oh thank you dumb turkey day, dumb-country, dumb poet. – Dumb Poet /2006 13
Feasts Listen to the thanks of a thousand reasons you enter the season, the holiday free zone. Now we can work up a feast & then play, everything at once: is the Solstice the reason? First there is Thanksgiving, giving what you think of, grace around the table. Things could be worse, you jerk, lighten up! Hanukkah is coming with all the candle lights, and Christmas after the Sun’s shortest day, just enough giving, and New Year’s to celebrate a happy beginning to a long labored past: what more to suggest but be free with your compliments, strive with the winners and plan a new feast. Rest is appropriate after eats.
/27Nov08
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Heavenly Blessed Earth Oh heavenly blessed Earth kissed when the embrace of love is steady it is the rule of Paradise, oh right here on Earth the enlightened fall and picked themselves up again. To be one of us and examples. Writing and teachings lift the Spirit a right community supports and the highest of all powers enervates our atoms and excites the Universe. Oh community, fellowship, the band of each to each as a perfect circle touches tolerance and love. May this thanksgiving last in substance & sustenance. Creator, created, creating we love you through one another. As the Earth supports fruitful if we cherish it, as gardeners and gatherers and dissolves most greed Oh heavenly blessed, Earth kissed.
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Walking Out Mother of turquoise Father of abalone shell Daughter of red stone Son of obsidian Bring me to the unidentified rock The splash of morning rain drying The colorations and stripes from Volcanic origin Time compresses into one time On our morning walk As we brush by four-wing salt bush Loaded with seeds And walk in coarse sand of the canyons and braided arroyos Up into the swelling slopes Of the mountain Sandias whispering down.
/from Nothing to Laugh About
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red wheel barrow, former turkey coop, storage shed, hill
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Day Before Thanksgiving at Home 2020 Thanks to Broadband the Sisters of Seclusion the lost parts of the outer space vehicle that crashed near Roswell thanks to the gum you chew the shoes on your feet the socks between your feet and the shoes thanks to the Doctrine of Delivery proposed by the Birth Goddess thanks to Yellowstone Park and the bears and animals there no thanks to people who interrupt the Cycles of Nature thanks to all stained glass artists and to the evening primrose depicted in the stained glass hanging in our sunroom window thanks to the inevitability of inevitability and the practicality of practical things thanks to the realization a person can do things and then that person actually doing them thanks for the energy to do anything at all and the resultant energetic doing thanks for sunlight hitting the Kaffir Lilies and the cactus and jade plant and cycad and the orchids and a lot more cactus in our sunroom where I can sit and hide from the pandemic thanks to the curious retreat of day from night and the curious retreat of night from day thanks for imagination which towers above everything and only dips down when we open our minds to it thanks for the air willing to enter my body when my lungs expand and invite it in thanks to all the past friends we hardly think of any more and thanks to those true friends who have died and still live with us thanks to humility which prevents me from using we and us too much I thank the amazing day when all the days of frustrating start and stop and go having finally, finally led to something thanks for my dealing with inferiority by my realizing my ancestors are inside me and giving me the power to speak thanks to rockets that actually go somewhere and don’t make too much of a mess when they fall thanks to scissors and nail clippers, toothbrushes and combs and the running water in our lavatory sink and toilet and shower thanks to my son for coming out and doing helpful things I’m too
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lazy or old to do and for just being my son with clear mind and respectful attitude thanks to my granddaughter living the life of someone beautiful getting through the hard knocks of getting around on this Earth filled with lots of people and a gross amount of ignorance no thanks to jelly beans but thanks to black beans, pinto and ansazi, one of the Three Sisters to be thankful for – beans, squash, corn thanks to the idea of survival, the hope for survival, the actual survival, the care and intellect to do so thanks to the ringing in my ears I fortunately don’t think about too much and my eyes open with their translucent splotches and floaters and sometimes fading out on me at the computer thanks to my lifelong companion my wife who wrapped a towel around my bleeding head when I fell and probably saved me from bleeding to death thanks to my love and respect for her that I never really show enough as I rarely speak to those I love the most thanks to the power of friendship which gives me someone just like myself and totally different I can feel close to thanks to feeling abandoned and isolated which teaches me I can supplant hopeless thoughts with reality which is always laughing with you whether you want to hear it or not thanks to the productivity of creativity which is like following upon an impulse which is the most delightful surprise you can ever experience thanks for all functions of the body alive and interrelating in their spheres, legs I love you thank you and trunk contents groin stomach chest arms, sore neck, head poor beat up head, thank you brain, you beleaguered power module doing the best you can I thank you Mozart, Robert Creeley and Bobbie, Gino, Gertrude Stein, Franz Kline, deKooning, Keith and Heloise Wilson, Ann Quin, Kurt Gödel, Margaret Randall, Ken, Steve, Latif, Kell, the Sisters of Muse, the companions of Tarot, IChing and Native Spirits that abound in every movement and past years and present fertility of the ground, Earth Mother base of everything – stars planets cosmos, here with our lonely loving selves, productively blessed thank you, honest love from a heart learning to be humbled.
larry goodell 19
love to all friends & acquaintances online, in line and out of line peace to all larry
and thank you Medicare, Social Security and all compassionate servants of the people
a duende offering updated 2020 po box 571 placitas, new mexico larrynewmex@gmail.com
For Thankful Cranks
Some Thanksgiving Poems
larry goodell
thank you Kenner Beverly Ancient Cottonwood and most of all, Lenore