Real Time

Love November dribbling, "always?", the remaining pines, the word "sway" alone out there (like thinned out pines), furnace and worthless pennies, and that final stunning line. Amen

Thanks Dianne for responding with great sensitivity to this collation of images and thoughts composed in 'real time'. I abhor the silence as it seems now to descend over Fictionaut, a place, after all, to speak.

November promotes sadness like a product. It should have a campaign with a "You Want It Bleaker?" theme. (Apologies to Mr. Cohen.)

"The losses pile up" as LG wrote and it's looking like Fictionaut is one of them.

This is real. And the copper smelting hits home for me. I live in Clarkdale, historic home of copper and smelting. The local bar is Smelter Town.

We need to keep feeding Fictionaut.

Yes, Dianne, boo hoo, Seasonal Fictional Disorder, all that. In truth I like much of November, the way it strips all of the prettiness out of the landscape and sends the tourists running for their central heating.

Thanks, Tim. Smelter town, wow. I worked for a lot of years in a couple of mill towns, around here, paper mills, as it happened. Whose stench, the local workers called "the smell of money." Yeah.

"November dribbles down the glass"

Perfect and powerful line that beautifully sets up the whole journey.

Thanks, Daryl for the read and the observation.

I agree David. November has been my favorite month for as long as I can remember. Darryl's right. . "November dribbles down the glass," is a perfect line. It will stay with me. It would make a cool visual poem too. I forget what it's called but there's some kind of poetry that presents by arranging the letters in interesting ways.

Seems a grey day in a physical space that echoes even here, where ruins of smelting are about an hour away (the one I know about at least) and it hasn't snowed (but it is doing so in the snow belt) so the dribbling down the glass resonates viscerally (in addition to being a great line)...very nice and seasonal.

I can visualize what that line might look like, Dianne, though I can't remember either what the form is called. There's an EE Cummings poem about a grasshopper that does it, perhaps a little too literally.

The smelting here is long past, fortunately Stephen, though there are new candidates for destructive practices lining up as I write.

"Somewhere people are killing
others without mercy"
Well said. Almost too on point!

"in a bucolic village once
a copper smelting waste

stone iron furnace now
a monument to
worthless pennies"

The last line - "Can't conjure what to thank for what" struck me as very William S Burroughs, "Thanksgiving Prayer" ...
"Thanks for a country where nobody's allowed to mind their own business
Thanks for a nation of finks

Yes
Thanks for all the memories"

Your piece is direct. I like it. *

Thanks Bill and Sam for your invaluable comments. And I'm very pleased to see both of you posting again with the kind of work one aspires to.
best

david