Posts by John Blase

It was the sound of summer rain that woke me this morning. And for an instant I was a boy again listening to the rain through a bedroom window slightly raised. My brother, younger, in the twin beside me breathed quiet as death. Our parents down a short hall murmured the things permissible only when…

Oh who am I kidding. There still are a few stubborns who refuse to yield. But more so these days there are scenes seen over the seventeen thousand odd days I have been becoming John. They all play now in my head, the silent movie of my low-budget technicolor life. I know it is now…

I took piano lessons for many years, something my mother never had as a girl but made sure was possible for me her boy. Although I learned the notes I preferred to play by ear, a talent my grandad had as well. It was magical to hear a song on the radio then go piece…

I took piano lessons for many years, something my mother never had as a girl but made sure was possible for me her boy. Although I learned the notes I preferred to play by ear, a talent my grandad had as well. It was magical to hear a song on the radio then go piece…

I know its an evil generation that seeks for a sign. But I’m not a generation, Lord. I’m one man asking to know if you’re still pleased. My sign doesn’t have to mimic the miracles from your heyday. I understand that was then and this, this is not then. I’m willing to take anything, anything…

It hurts to be present.   The robin lighted on the faded fence her back to me and raised her skirt and shit then flew away fast.   The robin wasn’t like or as anything. The robin was a robin. So too the fence a fence and her skirt of feathers and her shit.  …

Its not so much that I do not do the good that I want to do as it is I sometimes do not do simply because I am unsure what to do. Some would label this passivity, the same some who hold assertiveness as a virtue although for the life of me I cannot find…

As a boy I’d heard my father preach a hundred times of being surrounded by the great cloud of witnesses. Yet it was not until finding myself a man on a New Jersey summer afternoon that I felt thwarted by the clouds accentuating the peculiar and insistent nature of the sky. It was then my…

a world pretty much like the one we’ve got. I would have colored grass green and ordained that poetry would never sell well. I would have made a world where you can cut your finger off with a table saw if you’re not careful. You’re probably wondering if I would have permitted all that sickness…

We pray for salvation when deliverance is so near at hand.   Throw your pennies and nickels in the day’s fedora and let the day sing.     The truly free have learned to clap their hands and tap their toes   to whatever tune the day plays. And the truly mad, they even sing…