July 21, 2026: “The Game,” Easily Distracted, “Someplace Happy”

Yes, it has been a hot minute since my last post.  I could flood you with excuses, talk about how busy life has been, list everything’s that’s happened.  Independence Day.  Heat waves.  Toxic wildfire smoke.  Performing in Calumet.  Two Republican senators meeting their ends.  (Sorry, Mitch isn’t sucking down margaritas at a cushy rehab facility.)  War crimes against Iran.  Billionaires getting richer.  Teaching my summer class for the university.  The pigeon lady from Home Alone 2 dying.  

I’m easily distracted these days.  I have good intentions to write blog posts, new poems, a novella.  Make a dent in the stack of books I want to read.  Finish art projects.  Grade student papers.  Edit my new poetry manuscript.  So many plans, so little time.  

Marie Howe writes about childhood games . . .

The Game

by: Marie Howe

And on certain nights,

maybe once or twice a year,

I’d carry the baby down

and all the kids would come

all nine of us together,

and we’d build a town in the basement

from boxes and blankets and overturned chairs.

And some lived under the pool table

or in the bathroom or the boiler room

or in the toy cupboard under the stairs,

and you could be a man or a woman 

a husband or a wife or a child, and we bustled around

like a day in the village until

one of us turned off the lights, switch

by switch, and slowly it became night

and the people slept.

Our parents were upstairs with company or

not fighting, and one of us—it was usually

a boy—became the Town Crier,

and he walked around our little sleeping

population and tolled the hours with his voice,

and this was the game.

Nine o’clock and all is well, he’d say,

walking like a constable we must have seen

in a movie.  And what we called an hour passed.

Ten o’clock and all is well.

And maybe somebody stirred in her sleep

or a grown up baby cried and was comforted.

Eleven o’clock and all is well.

Twelve o’clock.  One o’clock.  Two o’clock . . . 

and it went on like that through the night we made up

until we could pretend it was morning.

This poem has so much truth in it.  As kids, we dream of growing up—all those freedoms of adulthood.  As adults, we dream of times gone by—childhoods filled with water balloon fights and school crushes and eternal summer vacations.  The grass is always greener in someone else’s backyard.  Younger people don’t get this until they become older people.  (How many times have I heard young people in my life, after working their first full-time job, saying to me after a couple of weeks, “Man, being an adult sucks!”?)

Yes, human beings rarely enjoy the present.  We look ahead all the time.  Oh, if I can just finish this poem, I’ll be happy!  Oh, I can’t wait for my vacation in six months!  Oh, I live for weekends!  Oh, I’m going to start enjoying life once I retire!  It seems like the future is always better and brighter.  

On the flip side, adults always look back wistfully on their childhoods.  There’s a reason why books like Little House on the Prairie and movies like The Breakfast Club and A Christmas Story are so popular.  They tap into that current of nostalgia that runs through all our veins.  True or not, we believe things were simpler and easier in the past.

My mother, in the last years of her life, lived in the past.  Her eyesight was bad.  Her hearing wasn’t much better.  She couldn’t remember who I was sometimes, and other times she would tell me stories about her girlhood in Detroit.  After my father died, she frequently asked about his whereabouts.  If we reminded her that Dad had died, her face crumpled with confusion and sadness as she experienced his loss anew.  The past became Mom’s happy place, where grief didn’t exist and joy was just a trip to Dairy Queen away.

Of course, that’s all bullshit.  There was still racism and misogyny and homophobia and Ronald Reagan in the past.  And I think we (current residents of the United States) can vouch for that fact that the future holds no promises of sunshine or low gas prices or peace. All we really have is the present, in all its current fucked-upness.  Worrying about tomorrow is about as useful as a wildfire smoke tariff on Canada..  

Here are things I celebrate about today:  blue sky, dinner and drinks with friends, chocolate, a puppy kiss, and warm pajamas.

Saint Marty wrote a poem about his mother for tonight , , ,

Someplace Happy

by: Martin Achatz

after she lost    her         husband          she didn’t

     remember         kept asking

when he was coming    home    accused him

of staying out         late        drinking with his pals

     from the Elks club    or    even worse

holing up at hunting camp         while she

slaved at home         took care of their nine kids

     they are    all grown     now        two dead

one with Down’s syndrome & Alzheimer’s

why would         you draw someone         back from

     someplace happy        with all her loves

still around        and she can still         remember

how to make          the good         tapioca from the pearls

     without having to           con         sult         the box

why    why    why    why    would you           want

to lure Dorothy back         from Oz         or

     Max back         from           the wild rum         pus

with all         the wild things         isn’t it bet    ter

if she just         keeps         wearing         those ruby      shoes

    eating emer    ald macarons         know         ing

Auntie Em is          still         there         wait         ing for           her

June 29, 2026: “The Copper Beech,” Boozy Book Fair, “Difficult Changes,” “Growing Up in Escanaba”

It’s raining right now.  After I finished dinner, I packed up a couple baskets of laundry and headed out to the laundromat.  Just as I was backing out of the driveway, the sky unzipped itself.  My windshield wipers couldn’t keep up with the buckets pouring down.

Now, as I sit typing this post, waiting for the socks and underwear to stop spinning, things have calmed down.  The heavens still look like an old nickel, and everything is sheathed in water. But I’m dry for the moment.  

Marie Howe writes about a rainstorm . . . 

The Copper Beech

by: Marie Howe

Immense, entirely itself,

it wore that yard like a dress,

with limbs low enough for me to enter it

and climb the crooked ladder to where

I could lean against the trunk and practice being alone.

One day, I heard the sound before I saw it, rain fell

darkening the sidewalk.

Sitting close to the center, not very high in the branches,

I heard it hitting the high leaves, and I was happy,

watching it happen without it happening to me.

I don’t mind rain.  In fact, my favorite kind of day is gray and full of mist.  All day, as I worked in my office at the library, I watched from my window as the trees banged their green heads in the wind as if jamming to the instrumental break in “Bohemian Rhapsody.”  In the distance, Lake Superior stretched its arms toward the shrouded horizon.  In short, it was a perfect day for a poet.

Two days ago, I took part in a Boozy Book Fair.  A bunch of authors and vendors set up tables and tents outside a brewery and sat there and talked about writing and poetry and books all day long.  I shared a space with one of my best poet friends.  The food trucks sold smoked pork and beef and brisket, and one of my favorite musicians/people in the whole world performed a two-hour concert.  (Truly, listening to him sing and play is like basking in sunlight.). Finally, right before I packed up to head home, I attended a workshop led by another one of my favorite people/poets in the whole world.

The whole day was like medicine for my tired soul.  Living in the United States is an exercise in exhaustion right now.  Every morning, I wake up afraid to check the news.  New wars.  A spiraling economy.  Human rights violations.  Every night, I close my eyes, hoping that I’ll wake up in an alternate reality where kindness and acceptance are the guiding forces.  It’s a recursive cycle of collective trauma.  

I may not have sold many books (just enough to over the registration fee and gas), but I literally felt like Tim Robbins at the end of The Shawshank Redemption, right after he crawls through a couple of miles of raw sewage and emerges into a pounding thunderstorm.  He spreads his arms wide, points hi face to the sky, and lets himself be baptized, grinning like a six-year-old on Christmas morning.  That’s the way I felt.

We all need rainstorm moments like that right now.  Every day is a new trauma, and almost everyone walks around a little shellshocked, unable to comprehend how the United States switched from decency to depravity so quickly.  It’s like we went from Mary Poppins with her magic carpetbag being in charge to Annie Wilkes with her sledgehammer.  

We all need a copper beech to shelter us from the shitstorm that is the United States of America currently.  Saturday, in that tent, surrounded by good books and good friends and good food and good music, I found my copper beech.  For a few hours, I just didn’t care about the rain, and it was a balm for my tired body and mind.

One of the services I offered at the Boozy Book Fair was what I call Flash Poetry.  For $5, I allowed anyone to give me a word or topic, and then I wrote a poem on that word or topic in ten minutes.  I’ve done this at several other events in the past, and I always marvel at what comes out of my pen.  For me, it’s instinctual.  I don’t know if it’s the short conversations I have with the customers or some kind of divine finger reaching down and tapping me on the shoulder, but I always come up with something that’s surprising (for me).  Plus, customers almost invariably are moved (sometimes to the point of tears) by what I produce.  Maybe I should call it Shelter from the Storm Poetry.

Below are a couple flash poems Saint Marty wrote that day.  They’re not polished.  Think of them as wildflowers you pick as you hike a difficult mountain path.

Difficult Changes

by: Martin Achatz

We endure them all the time—

say goodbye to old friends who

decide to move away, let go

of books we love, kiss mothers

as they breathe their last breaths.

Yet, we survive, move one, become

something better, like caterpillars.

Feel those wings on your shoulders 

now, spread them in all their stained

glass glory.  Test the wind, feel

the sun as you launch yourself

into that bright, blue, cloudless

newness—you will soar!

Growing Up in Escanaba

by: Martin Achatz

We were grounded by a lake, morning,

noon, night.  Summer, we jumped 

on our bikes, surfed into the blue

day, wind on our sweaty backs.

We thought we would live forever then,

our bodies tuned to the key of adventure,

our mothers and fathers the sirens

that called us home for dinners,

maybe a rerun of Star Trek or

I Love Lucy after our bottle rocket

popsicles,  These were our days, clutched

in our sticky fists, like swing chains,

as we pumped and pumped ourselves

until our toes kicked the moon.

June 22, 2026: “The Attic,” Hard Topics, “Triggering”

My faithful disciples know that I pretty much write about anything.  Nothing is off limits.  The only subjects taboo for me are the ones I don’t own.  For example, I don’t write about other people’s medical issues or personal tragedies unless given permission by those people.  Even then, I change names and details to protect identities.  

Over the 17 years I’ve been writing these posts, I’ve blogged about sexual addiction, mental illness, suicide, grief, and physical abuse, among other topics.  My life is an open book.  If you really want to know who I am, just go back to the beginning of Saint Marty in 2010 and start reading.  After six-thousand or so posts, you’ll probably have a pretty good idea of who I am.  

Marie Howe tackles a difficult topic . . . 

The Attic

by: Marie Howe

Praise to my older brother, the seventeen-year-old boy, who lived 

in the attic with me an exiled prince grown hard in his confinement,

bitter, bent to his evening task building the imaginary building

on the drawing board they’d given him in school.  His tools gleam

under the desk lamp.  He is as hard as the pencil he holds,

drawing the line straight along the ruler.

Tower prince, young king, praise to the boy

who has willed his blood to cool and his heart to slow.  He’s building

a structure with so many doors it’s finally quiet,

so that when our father climbs heavily up the attic stairs, he doesn’t

at first hear him pass down the narrow hall.  My brother is rebuilding

the foundation.  He lifts the clear plastic of one page

to look more closely at the plumbing,

—he barely hears the springs of my bed when my father sits down—

he’s imagining where the boiler might go, because

where it is now isn’t working.  Not until I’ve slammed the door behind

the man stumbling down the stairs again

does my brother look up from where he’s working.  I know it hurts him

to rise, to knock on my door and come in.  And when he draws his skinny

arm around my shaking shoulders,

I don’t know if he knows he’s building a world where I can one day

love a man—he sits there without saying anything.

Praise him.

I know he can hardly bear to touch me.

This is what I would call a brave poem.  Howe is tackling the subject of sexual/physical abuse by a parent (at least that’s my take).  She isn’t trying to shock the reader; she stays away from explicit details.  Instead, Howe pays tribute to her 17-year-old brother, who provides the kind of love and support that will allow her to overcome, heal, and eventually forge healthy relationships with the men in her life.  That’s an amazing act of love.

Emily Dickinson advises to “[t]ell all the truth but tell it slant” in one of her poems.  I think that’s what Howe does in this poem.  When dealing with a difficult subject, it’s easier to approach it from the side versus head on.  Sort of like admiring a solar eclipse—you can’t look at it directly or it will inflict serious harm.  Poetry is all about slant telling.

Today, I have no monumental or earth-shattering truth to reveal.  I worked at the library all day, including a writing workshop in the evening.  That’s it.  I’ve been working through the idea for a novella, and I think I got a jumpstart on the opening paragraphs in the workshop.  That makes me feel like I actually accomplished something important.  

When I was working on my Bigfoot manuscript, I used to say that I was wrestling with Bigfoot when I started a new poem.  I can still use that metaphor, I think, event though I have no intention of ever writing another Bigfoot poem in my life.  (Sorry folks, no sequels coming your way.)

So, Saint Marty wrestled with Bigfoot tonight and came up with this . . . 

Triggering

by: Martin Achatz

“Never write a poem that ought to have a poem written about it . . .”

          — Richard Hugo

In grad school, I was told never to write

a poem with the words love and heart

in it.  I was also cautioned against bone

and soul, as if those innermost parts

of ourselves will wither in sunlight

to brown husks, flake into dust on the tongue

that speaks them.  I think a poet must

fall in love with someone or something

in order to write about her or him or it or them.

For instance, I fell in love with my toothpaste

this morning, its minty heart alive

against the bone of my teeth.  I’m not

sure if my soul has a scent, but it it does,

I’ll bet it’s Colgate fresh, scrubbed clean

of the plaque of loss and regret and anger.

Am I allowed to use those words, Mr. Hugo?

Or should I floss them from this poem’s gums

like a popcorn kernel or stubborn apple seed?

June 21, 2026: “Practicing,” Adulting, “Father’s Day, Rainy and Cool”

Adulting kinda sucks.

When you’re a kid, everything is new and exciting.  You can’t wait to be old enough to drive a car and get laid and earn money and buy booze.  All of adolescence is a rehearsal for adulthood, and, when you’re a kid, you’re convinced that with age comes limitless freedom and joy.  

Similarly, most adults I know yearn for the simplicity and security of childhood.  (I’m generalizing here.  I know not all childhoods are safe and uncomplicated, and I honor those kids who are forced at very young ages to deal with very grownup struggles.)  Stereotypically, we mythologize our childhoods.  We’re all cast members on The Brady Bunch.  

Marie Howe writes about the thrills of adolescence . . . 

Practicing

by: Marie Howe

I want to write a love poem for the girls I kissed in seventh grade,

a song for what we did on the floor in the basement

of somebody’s parents’ house, a hymn for what we didn’t say but thought:

That feels good or I like that, when we learned how to open each other’s

mouths how to move our tongues to make somebody moan.  We called it

practicing, and one was the boy, and we paired off—maybe six or eight girls,

and turned off the lights and kissed and kissed until we were stoned on kisses,

and lifted our nightgowns or let the straps drop, and, Now you be the boy:

concrete floor, sleeping bag, couch, playroom, game room, train room, laundry.

Linda’s basement was like a boat with booths and portholes

instead of windows.  Gloria’s father had a bar downstairs with stools that

spun, plush carpeting.  We kissed each other’s throats.

We sucked each other’s breasts, and we left marks, and never spoke of it

upstairs, outdoors, in daylight, not once.  We did it, and it was

practicing, and slept, sprawled so our legs still locked or crossed, a hand still

lost in someone’s hair . . . and we grew up and hardly mentioned who

the first kiss really was—a girl like us, still sticky with moisturizers we’d

shared in the bathroom.  I want to write a song

for that thick silence in the dark, and the first pure thrill of unreluctant

desire—just before we made ourselves stop.

Howe really captures that adolescent longing for adult experience in this poem.  Adolescent boys experiment with similar taboos, and, just like the girls in Howe’s poem, they don’t speak of these basement encounters in broad daylight.  It’s pretty common, although most guys will not admit it.  The stigma is just too strong.

I’ve been thinking a lot about my adolescence and childhood today.  I was a pretty easy kid, I think.  I never really gave my parents anything to worry about.  I didn’t smoke a joint until my junior year.  Didn’t get blackout drunk until I was a senior.  I only went on a few dates as a teenager, and the condom I carried around in my backpack never fulfilled its intended purpose during my high school career.  I thought I was going to live forever.

Now, I’ve had sex at least twice (as evidenced by my two kids).  I’ve also had a few careers—in healthcare and higher education and church music and event programming.  I know more than half of my life is behind me, and I’ve lost several family members and friends.  Mortality is very present in my day-to-day existence.  

Today was the first day of summer.  It was also Father’s Day.  I stopped by the cemetery this afternoon to visit my dad’s grave. It was raining pretty hard, but I stood there for a couple minutes, thinking about all the things I never said to my dad (and the things I DID say to him that I now regret).  As a kid, I thought I had all the time in the world.  Young people drench themselves in immortality the way they drench themselves in Axe body spray or Love’s Baby Soft.

I loved my dad, but he and I were very different people with very different values.  I can’t recall a single time that my dad said “I love you” to me.  Almost daily, however, I tell my son and daughter that I love them.  If the only memory they have of me when I’m gone is the fact that I said “I love you” way too my times, that’s enough.  I’ve done my job as their father.

Saint Marty wrote this poem about his dad for Father’s Day . . . 

Father’s Day, Rainy and Cool

by: Martin Achatz

I stand by my dad’s stone this afternoon

by myself, his Memorial Day flag now soaked,

deflated as a beached jellyfish.  The air

is stiff with the smell of worm and mud.

Most of my dad is here, although my sisters

have lockets of his ashes in their dresser drawers.

My son has an urn on his bookshelf.  I know

it contains the ashes of my dad’s pointer finger,

the one he always jabbed at my chest,

sinking his love into me like a rusty nail.