Long Hemingway Poems
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He drank with the men
who would later deny knowing his name.
That is the way of the world.
A man learns it slowly,
like learning winter from the sea.
There were nights of bread and cheap wine,
hands on shoulders,
promises spoken low as prayers.
They called him brother,
And she was their sister
They meant it then.
Or maybe they only meant the warmth,
the full glass,
the use of him.
Loyalty is quiet.
It does not pound its chest.
It stays when the room grows cold
and the money is gone.
Betrayal speaks more.
It laughs too loudly.
It explains itself.
A good dog knows his master.
A good man knows his friends
by how they leave.
One left over fear.
One for money.
One because crowds are easier
than conscience.
The betrayed man said little about it.
There is no poetry in begging people to stay.
A man keeps moving.
He fishes.
He lights another cigarette.
He watches the dark water
and understands something at last:
that loyalty is rarer than courage,
and betrayal comes easiest
to those already weak inside.
Still, he poured another drink
for the next stranger who sat beside him.
Because even after betrayal,
a man must live
as though loyalty still exists somewhere
in this tired world.
I am 70 years old…I spent a good deal of my life teaching students with Autism
I like to think I’m as enlightened as I can be…
I work in a bookstore for goodness sake…
if anyone knows not to judge a book by its cover…that anyone should be me!
On the walks I take each morning it’s rare for me to see
another person on the street who gets up as early as me.
But the other morning as I turned downtown..up ahead of me…not too far away
I saw a large figure looking in a window…and I was heading his way.
He was wearing a black trench coat that stretched down to his feet.
Did I mention he was large…and tall…this person I was destined to meet?
As I got closer I realized he was looking in the window of my bookstore.
and how in the time it took to reach him…he seemed even larger than before.
He looked at me and smiled…then said, “I love bookstores…don’t you?”
“They’re filled with knowledge…different stories and different points of view.”
I exhaled (I hadn’t realized I’d been holding my breath) and said,
“I totally agree with you…
and believe it or not,” I smiled back,“I work in this bookstore too!”
We talked about authors he liked…
from Kurt Vonnegut, to Alexander Dumas to Ernest Hemingway…
and after spending a few moments together…we went on our separate ways.
As he walked away I called to him and when he turned his head…
I said, “Come back Friday night when I’m working…
maybe we’ll find a book you haven’t read.”
When I first saw him from a distance I immediately judged him on his looks…
which is never very smart…
because, once again, I learned you can’t always tell form the outside…
what someone is thinking…what’s inside a person’s heart.
As I headed home I realized I was not as enlightened as I thought I was
and I wondered if he’ll come back Friday…
I sure hope he does.
Shakespeare& C0
6-7 years ago, I was in Paris for a wedding and reading poetry,
the reading was met with protests by the public who protested again
my anti-Israel and pro-Palestinian poems.
The day after walking about I was trying to find the Paris of Dos Passos
and Ernest Hemingway, found a city overpriced looking like any others.
I happened to walk past a bookshop “Shakespeare & co” I walked in
met by a million of books.
I had two slim volumes of my own effort, and naively asked if I could place
them here? The answer was yes, I filled out a form with my address,
and that was it. It was only later I realized my tiny books were the company with
the greatest poets and writer in the western world.
I never contacted the bookshop again, but often wonder if anyone has browsed
through my work and liked what I had written.
( On the eternal non-sequitur of Prose Poetry )
The mess on the passenger side floor of my dodge van is prose... or poetry?
The battle rages!
Are we dialectical heirs, or hairs?
"The cross or the cross hairs". Carrol said that.
"He was awake a long time before he remembered his heart was broken". That's Hemingway.
"A rose by any other name". Shakespeare, of course.
A poetic work in the making... A poetic mess!
Of all, only the half-drunk bottle of Merlot taunts me to exhume it.
The rest are content to be casts off of a crippled civility,
becoming themselves reminders, of the broken heart that names them.
As for me, I smoke life-shortening cigarettes in the sun-damaged van,
drink blasts of black Merlot in the shadows hush, and somewhere,
in midst of these confusing conspiracies, value oscillates- a shame-faced moon wanes.
Some draw to the light. Others, the flame.
A canary bird in its cage placed near a window
a leafy tree of spring, where lesser sparrows sat
wished for the mystical word, freedom
Was the freedom the canary bird saw real or not
constructed by an AI method, like the journalist
in a famous newspaper had seen a clip where
her husband was eating lettuce with a rabbit
Ai, opens up a scary world, where fake is true
and we can't know the difference
The eyes seeing us are blind, they have no life
and do not know they are construct
but human-like robots might in time develop
a conscience, primitive at first like the first primates
on earth wondering why they were the first
animals who knew they were different and sought
there must be a God, for many to disown this
concept, like robots who will not obey humans
The AI construct also interferes with the written word
On YouTube, we read articles extolling the life
of certain famous people, perfectly written but fake
we see this, some of us, by the uncritical method
or lack of reality that makes the written dead as
a Dodo and equally boring
I see AI-inspired offers that anyone can write a novel
by letting the AI do the tedious work like writing
All it needs is your name and a few details and voila
you are guaranteed a bookshelf placed beside names
like Ernest Hemingway et all
Yes, we do live in a scary world when we lose sight
of what is human-made or an AI construct
I have a special interest in telling about my colonoscopy.
The doc cheerful, secure in his specialty, colon cancer being
the second leading cause of cancer death after lung tumors.
They can snip the precancerous polyps right out of you during the test.
At first the doc gave me the statistics but having paid 25 bucks for this
interview
I decided to make him explain the science. He was most comfortable
describing the physical architecture of adenomatous v. hyperplastic polyps
but what about cell structure I said. He was vague about genes and
hormones,
I could have been chatting with an Electrolux salesman.
I wasn’t worried although my ass was burning.
Everybody dies, everybody, even Whitman and Emerson, so I browse
models for dying—
mine are middlebrow, saddlebow—John Wayne in The Shootist, Paul
Newman in Hombre—or hagiography
Plath her head stuck in an oven, Hemingway who ate his shotgun.
Anyway I was upbeat flirting with the nurse, a muse who has seen it all
before,
acting tough, which isn’t actually an act
you do your prep and say your prayers.
I thought I’d be in and out butt as you probably already know
the prep for this procedure is worthy of Gandhi. A day of fasting,
clear fluids only, and constant voiding.
You arrive at the hospital one spiritual chicken.
I reflected it can’t hurt, lose a little weight, remember who you are
without so much and flesh between you and the natural world.
Snipping polyps is like taking electrons to a lower quantum energy level,
nearer the nucleus, with fasting and sexual abstinence.
The art of total presence and abstinence, dependence on the doctor for
future existence.
Chimbote Peru
I was a pilot on a transport plane when
it landed in Chimbote I worked for a small air transport
company “Vanilla Air” who accepted med despite
I wore glasses when waiting for cargo back to Rio
walked around the town. At a café, I met a well-rounded woman
and sparks flew between us, she, Sophia was the widow
of train master who had accidentally been run over by his own train,
The pension she got from the state was paltry.
at the hotel, she told me her dream was to go to America and
I confessed my wish to write like Hemingway.
We had a few lovely days together, but then the company rang
the cargo was ready to be shipped to Rio.
The co-pilot had disappeared, and I had to navigate and fly solo,
the plane was old and overloaded it took long to get high enough
to fly over the Andes. (Douglas 47type of air-craft)
In Rio I had a few beers and thought of Sophie, a love story was
over there no sequel.
The journey back
The trail
An Author of books
“FOR WHOM THE BELLS TOLL” my look
From Miami to Key West
The whom being I
4 hour venture to tour Ernest Hemingway’s house in Key West, Florida
Through his writings encouraged me to write
Extending my own words into theory
Mr. Hemingway being the vision of what words can be, and illustrating thoughts
The whom being can
The glance and grasp
I did a critical analysis of my College English 101 Professor’s Assigned I chose “FOR WHOM THE BELLS TOLL”
I got an A for my analysis of the book
Ernest Hemingway was an impact
His words bringing fact
His accomplishments are hard to keep track
Ernest Hemingway write up
Analysis complete.
The fancy degree from a world famous school
set in a frame that’s worth more
than the paper on which it’s printed
all the awards
the accolades
none of it has taught you
the lessons I learned long ago
before either of us could even read or had ever heard
of Shakespeare or Marlowe
Dickens or Carroll or Hemingway
when we were but larvae of what we would become
when you put on your first pair of patent leather shoes
polished to a high shine
before you toddled to the table for tea
at around the same time that half a world away
I slipped into my sandals
the straps hanging by a thread
the holes in the soles patched with duct tape
before sauntering into the kitchen
to spread mayonnaise or mustard or margarine
onto a single slice of stale bread
so I would have something in my stomach
to see me through until supper
which would consist of a can of some sort of beans
and a ten cent box of macaroni and cheese
with slices of cheap hot dogs stirred in
sometimes cut into quarters
when money was even more tight due to a medical bill
some other unexpected expense
You may be capable of convincing an audience
but you can never really know
You will never understand what that life is
Some things they can’t teach you at Cambridge
John Hemingway has died at the age of a hundred and five
It was the luck of the Irish he said that helped him to survive
At the age of nineteen he left his home in County Dublin
And enlisted in the Royal Air Force and was officially sworn in.
It was at the age of twenty-one that he took to the sky
After having gained his pilot wings enabling him to fly
He'd gone to England's assistance in their darkest hour
And he never once gave up even when things turned sour.
He was shot down four times but always found his way back
And defended our skies from a relentless German attack
Their brave defence became known as the ‘Battle of Britain’
But for those brave pilots Germany would have won I am certain.
He flew hurricanes and spitfires in combat during his career
Always facing the enemy head on and never showing any fear
Once his spitfire was shot down whilst on a mission over Italy
His parachute didn't deploy fully but his fall was broken by a tree.
Others called him a hero, but he never claimed himself to be
Often said he was just doing a job for the defence of the country
He lost many comrades on missions it was a dangerous thing to do
John and his fellow brave comrades became known as ‘The Few’.
It's people like John who made great sacrifices for their country
And it is because of their sacrifice we live in peace, and are free
We owe those brave pilots a great debt that we can never repay
How fitting for John that he died peacefully on St Patrick's day.
Group Captain John Allman Hemingway
17/07/1919 — 17/03/2025