Overcast morning
listen to the croaking frog
under thorny bush

Whose arm is that? I think I know.
Its owner is quite sad, though.
It is a tale of woe,
They watch him frown. She cries hello.
He gives his arm a shake,
And sobs until the tears make.
The only other sound’s the break,
Distant cars and birds awake.
The arm is broken, swollen, and deep,
But he has promises to keep,
Until then, he shall not sleep.
He lies in bed with ducts that weep.
He rises from his bitter bed,
With thoughts of sadness in his head,
He rejoices at not being dead.
Facing the day with very little said.

There once was a lass who liked cake.
She said, “See the lovely bake!”
It was unusually flat,
Round but not very fat,
And ate it for goodness sake.

Pay attention to the Ukrainian fighters,
The Ukrainian leadership is the most cunning non-revolutionary master of all.
“Silence.” said the Ukrainian government,
And “silence” then “silence” again.

The empty passenger cars
joined by the rotting diner.
It too is empty, bare
and abandoned, desiccating
In hot summer sun.
It is of that one greater generation gone,
How I mourned the awful sight.
Down, down, down into the darkness of memory’s tunnel,
Quickly it goes by, obscured, forgotten, a shadow.
Pay attention to these rolling ruins,
They shall never come ’round again.
How soon we forget the one-time living.

a tiny roof, however hard it tries,
will always be overhead.
are you upset by how noisy it is?
does it tear you apart to see the tiny roof so warped?

many people walk
antiquated wood boardwalks
because of the slope

past the midday heat
the tiny black crickets cry
under old tin roof

Update on my arm — upper left radial and lower humorous adjacent to the elbow. Damn, it hurts!

Since I cannot type with one hand, I thought it would be okay to remove my sling and the forearm supported by my desk and set to work banging out four-thousand words in various news stories.

It worked very well, thank you. I will say that my arm was slightly sore once done, but other than that, Comme ci, comme ça.

Then my wife asked me to bring a 24-can case of Pepsi into the kitchen. Without thinking, I lifted it with my left hand, attached to my left arm, and yee-ow-za!

The pain was blinding. After getting the case to the kitchen counter, I quickly sat down and let the sweat drip from me.

An hour later, my son and daughter-in-law came over for a visit. With them, they brought Honey, their dog.

With it being 80 degrees and the dog wearing a sweater put on her to battle the morning chill, I decided to remove it. That is when my left arm, still in the sling and yet in use, made an audible pop, and I nearly passed out from the pain.

Yup — I broke the effing thing. It is one more thing on a list of many things that have not gone well this year.

Recently, I encountered a mountain lion as I was leaving the print shop one late night. Then the fed’s trapped one near Genoa, some 30 miles southwest of Virginia City.

While we don’t know if it is that cat, we did do some speculating that it could be. A news story about the capture and how I had seen one made the Comstock Chronicle, one of the papers I write for and print.

Bringing an extra copy home, one leftover from my delivery route, my wife took note of the story.

“You never told me about this,” she said.

“No, I didn’t,” I said. “I’m stupid, but not dumb. I figured it was better that you didn’t know since I had to be up there after dark the next week.”

“Oh,” she said. “Thank you, and I love you for that.”

I’m still wondering if there was a glitch in the matrix.