Adversity comes in swells.
One has to learn when it's time
to lean and when it's time to curl.

                  ~James Eric Watkins

 Words change us, which is the first step to changing the rest of the world.

                                                               (C) 2020 James Eric Watkins

By the Sword

My father lived by the sword. One could say the odds were stacked against him. One could say that he rose from nothing to be a millionaire. One could say a lot of things about my father. But it will be his oldest son that tells his story.  Allen, as his father called him, was born in 1949. He died a horrible death in 1994. I always thought it odd the way the 4 and the 9 became reversed, disorientated like the pieces of metal and plastic that made up his truck did upon smashing into that concrete culvert in the early-morning fog of March.

It was 1950 when his mother, Dora, disappeared into the smoke for the last time after carrying him and his siblings to safety outside their burning cabin must have flashed through his mind during his final moments in trauma, hyperventilating from the loss of blood and air from his caved in chest. The life escaping from his body as his memories played in a loop.

Yet his spirit, the essence of him, lingered around for many years. Within a year or so after his official death, I felt him in the latter stages of a dream, early as the sun was rising just as he did in the morning. I shook myself awake to catch a glimpse of him walking passed where I slept. I saw him clearly.He gave me warning and slammed the door on the way out of the room to let me know that there was no mistake. It was him and he could manipulate the physical world, at least when he felt strongly enough  about it. 

On many strange occasions, it seems he had manipulated the physical world somehow to keep me from dying, from car accidents that I came out of barely harmed to gun shots that somehow missed me. I don't remember seeing his presence for a long while after the warning and the door slam. However, I felt him all the time, all around me, especially in nature. I don't remember him showing up when I broke my neck, when I woke up with my had in the glove box of a Pontiac Grandam and a paramedic touching me on the shoulder. Since he didn't make an appearance then, I figured his soul had finally moved on. 

But when I fell into that basement a few years later, and my head sounded like a .22 magnum bullet being fired when my head hit the floor, and the sixteen-penny nail heads were embedded in my skull, trauma showed up and so did my father. He let me know how badly I had fucked up, doing too many drugs and not sleeping for days, then attempting to set huge trusses on a ladder over an open basement! Not smart! But after my dad's assessment of the situation and advice to fly away with in the helicopter as I was getting shot up with morphine, I regrouped and tried to take a different path after being released from intensive care.

I have followed the way of sword, the way of the gun and the fist, lived by it just as my father did. But I know that the mind always wins. I believe it. He knew the importance of the mind. But I'm not sure he realized, as I do now, that, like Einstein's imagination of the mind, it is more important than the knowledge of the sword.

Haiku

inhibited moon--
the neon overpowers 
yellow and red leaves 

(C) 2020 James Eric Watkins

 

©2020 

 

James Eric Watkins · Lunatic & Guitar

©2020 James Eric Watkins

 

James Eric Watkins · Reading Of Hanging Man

©2020 James Eric Watkins

©2020 

 

 

©2020 

Father

 Each day that I
 grow beyond
 the age that you
 were is the strangest
 day I will ever know.

Each day
that I grow
beyond the age
that you were
is the strangest day
I will ever know.

Every day

I

grow older than

You

is the strangest day 

I will ever know.

©  2020 James Eric Watkins

 Poetry is our life force, teaching us to befriend the pain.

                                             James Eric Watkins 

The Evolution of a Single Haiku

a complex tale
told on surface
of still water

complex tales told
on the surface
of still water

A thousand words
ripple away:
once still water

Gazing down upon
reflections: Once still water
tells quite a story.

Gazing down upon
my reflection in water:
far from short story.

A complex story
Is told in my reflection
On once still water.

 

©2020 James Eric Watkins

 

Will We Ever See
What Is Making The Shadows
Upon The Cave Wall?

©2020 James Eric Watkins

Pieces

Pieces of me lie scattered across this land, across time.
Some pieces swing on grapevines over ravines
not far from the coalmines. Some pieces had heroes.

Some pieces lost pieces of themselves.

And the pieces that are left . . .
They sometimes seem to forget what confidence is

and are not
quite sure
of anything.

© 2020 James Eric Watkins

*Published in the Scioto Voice Newspaper

Alyssa

You

Lost time
in a linear mind

searches and never finds
someone to be kind

to

someone
to find me

some
one

like
you.

© 2020 James Eric Watkins

If one is to know this blog, perhaps they should be introduced to its precursor: http://endlesssaga.blogspot.com/

Lunatic: The Confessions of E. Allen Rockford

My Sense is Real

Standing alone among the trees
and the wind, my senses become
alive with a childlike wonder and awe.

And a form of communication begins
between a man’s soul and the nature
he has been given to revel in.

A bird ascends and perches.

Suddenly that single bird becomes
everything, everything that has ever
happened in his life, every sad thing
every beautiful thing that has ever existed

and died. Rain drips from the sky. 

Startle me cold but more alive.

© 2020 James Eric Watkins

Neil

You pounded the beat of a closer heart

Into my soul since birth. You sent vibrational glory

To repair the brokenness of a man you never knew.

Thank you, Neil, for being born, for living, for creating

Treasures to be rediscovered for all those whose ears

Are wise enough to listen. The great one, Neil, lived

And always will

In the music.

© 2020 James Eric Watkins