I haven't followed through yet on setting up on-line sales for Wild Once and Captured, but I'd be happy to sell people a copy and mail it directly to them. I'll pay the postage, but you'll have to mail me a check for $16 to get the book. If I know you and you want me to inscribe the copy I send, I'd be happy to do it.
In fact, I'm really enjoying writing something personal to people I know who want a copy. It forces me to think hard about the person I'm writing to, and it turns out that there's always something in particular and individual about them that makes whoever they are special to me. It shows a little bit of the value of focusing on the people around you. (And, I find that I still have plenty of time otherwise to think about me.)
If I don't know you, but you still want me to inscribe something, tell me about yourself. We will find a point of connection that way, I'm sure.
But even if the real goal of writing Wild Once and Captured is to put a copy in as many hands as I can, I still gotta get paid. Send a check for $16 to Jeff Epton, 3735 17th Place NE, Washington, DC, 20018 and I'll send you Wild Once and Captured, which, by the way, is not a reference to some personal characteristic of me, but a reference to Justice, who was wild once, and captured, but has also broken out again (and again, as necessary).
The Courage All Around
Late-night honest
with myself
My boy shames me
The courage he shows
drumming at the Metro
Spare change pours in
Folded bills drifting like
snow covering his lap
Ten years old, first
sharing a buck
with a woman who asks,
then shooing her away
when she won’t stop
asking for more
He goes about his business,
a lionheart tending his
pride of intentions,
while I flinch at the work
before me, at stepping up
before you, at speaking my piece
But where he’s heading,
where heart and skill
and the company of others,
the company of you,
colleagues with an instinct
to be movement and reach
we can believe in,
that place, that thought, swells
my heart The world you will build
beckons and beguiles
and because the heart is
a complicated thing
I feel no shame here
I feel the courage all around
Lives
In Progress
When
So-and-so met her
she
was already Much-the-much.
Lucky
first is sweet and
So-and-so
and Much-the-much
felt
smiled upon and loved.
The
thing got good.
Got
better still.
Near
peaked.
The
best seemed a handhold away,
but
not luck, nor will
nor
providence gave boost
and
So-and-so and Much-the-much
passed
all the signposts going down.
But
this had yet to unfold,
preceded,
as it were,
by
the years when
Clear-headed
and Hard-nosed
stalked
fresh and deep and
sperm-spewing
into the yielding
valley
of the Great Green River
and
the path to boys and girls was
blazed.
Blazed.
And
this was cause for celebration
without
biblical precedent.
So
here we are
10,000
years later,
give
or take an Ice Age or
some
geological wink, still celebrating.
Clearly
this one is a party
whose
guests have rooted deep
long
after So-and-so and Much-the-much
have
forgotten that they were and who.
For
their survivors,
coming
after lights-out:
Begin
anew you Eve,
you
Adam. It’s Friday,
and
the party starts now, if you will.
But
it would not hurt to keep in mind
that
how you begin has much, quite much,
to
do with how all this concludes.
Where Do Ideas Come From?
The surface is a lonely place.
There’s no air,
no water, nothing erodes.
The rocks are sharp.
The interior’s hot. Wet.
Air’s too thick.
Water drips, pools.
Swamps abound.
Shades and silhouettes,
weightless, multiply.
The lonely places are not private places.
Nothing’s fully realized in the hot interior.
But when the striving stops,
the clamor, the cleaving,
the thunderous dividing stops,
then the lake breeze blows,
babies cry delight,
communities spring up to dance,
and great ideas come from
all their hiding places.
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