BOOMER
BOOMER — a found poem What is a found poem – “A found poem is a poem created by taking words, phrases, and sentences from existing texts (like newspapers, books, signs, or websites) and rearranging them to form a new poetic work, essentially creating a literary collage that gives the original words new meaning. This method,…
Going Straight
An excerpt from the nonfiction book “Misdemeanor Outlaw” (Blue Heron Book Works, 2017) Every outlaw capable of emotion has visions of going straight. Even if the fear of being caught or guilt over the damage his behavior has done to others doesn’t motivate the desire into action, the need to feel normal in a way…
A Teaching Moment
A Teaching Moment Note: This is an excerpt from a longer work entitled The End of an Era and that book chronicles my life in the early 1970’s after I returned from Vietnam, spent a final three years at college, and took a job with the Department of Social Services of New York City. The…
Droll Thing Life Is
“Droll thing life is – that mysterious arrangement of merciless logic for a futile purpose. The most you can hope from it is some knowledge of yourself – that comes too late – a crop of inextinguishable regrets. I have wrestled with death. It is the most unexciting contest you can imagine. It takes place…
Never Such Innocence Again
I will have a new book of poems soon. My publisher says probably by early autumn. It is a collection of selected and new poems on a specific theme. The included poems come randomly chosen from the seven original volumes of earlier work because they follow the theme of war somehow, either through my personal…
June 10, 2025
As a Marine veteran wounded in combat in a foreign country, I have some things to say about chicken-shit Trump sending active-duty battle Marines to an American city. First the mission of the Marine Corps, and they are very good at it, is to obliterate the enemy, to kill without mercy. We swear to do…
The Elegance of Freedom
The Elegance of Freedom A few years ago, in the spring when the Dogwoods bloomed and the air smelled like perfume, I happened to be in New Orleans at the time of the annual Jazz and Heritage Festival. Here I was, beer in hand, at the Fox Studio stage tent, one of several around Fairgrounds…
Kafkaesque
Franz Kafka lived between 1883 and 1924. It was a time of great turmoil and violent change on earth but especially for Western civilization. Born in Prague, Kafka trained as a lawyer and spent his adulthood as one, working mostly on insurance-related claims. He also wrote stories as a hobby, although he never thought of…
Don’t Quit
About three decades ago when I was still a young pup around fifty years old, I was a member of an athletic club in Louisville. I went there three or four days a week to exercise. Yes, I had to hit the whirlpool afterwards even then. One day, as I ran, I reflected on something…
The Fourth Estate of Manipulation
(The term Fourth Estate or fourth power refers to the press and news media in their explicit capacity, beyond the reporting of news, of wielding influence in politics.) The mind is a wonderful and terrible beast. Besides the ability to logically reason, we have the ability to logically associate. Where reasoning often gets us from…
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Jim McGarrah, Author 