Deanotations Issue 1

(this is the complete issue published in 1984)

Dear Reader, This is the first (he said, optimistically) of a series of I-don't-know-whats. They're sort of poems. So this is sort of a short poetry magazine. But it's also, sort of, a letter. Call it a poetry letter. I'm no editor with a passionate desire to make people read "the very best" literature. I'm a guy with things to say to people he cares for, many of whom he hasn't met yet. When I have something to say to a friend far away, I write a letter. I have things I want to say to lots of people. I'm not sure that books and poetry magazines are the best ways to say these things. So I've decided to write lots of letters and send them to as many people as I can. I'd like to send out about one a month. It's free - letters usually are. No subscriptions needed (you might try paying me to stop) - but postage and paper cost money, so if you enjoy these "deanotations", send me a contribution - say five or ten or a million dollars (I don't know if it's deductable - I'll find out) - to Dean Blehert, 2345 Nebraska Ave., NW, Washington, DC 20016 (no, everything in DC is NOT publically funded). I'll put together a special bonus mailing for contributors. Also send me: Names and addresses of people to whom you'd like me to send my poetry letters. Also send me your poems - not to publish (you can write your own letters - please do), but since I'm showing you mine, you can show me yours. Love, Dean	Fame has not changed me, though I daily bask in the applause of future readers.          ----- Someday physiologists will realize there are no smile muscles. You have to leap outside your head and with airy fingers tickle the mouth's corners.          ----- If I sit very quietly for a very long time, the living-room furniture will forget I'm here and resume its secret rites.          ----- Four PM - already getting dark. I hope they are enjoying the sun wherever it went as much as I would.          ----- What if I woke up to the same sun and sky, but could not find you? How, then, could I go on hoping ever again to be free of the sun and the sky?          ----- I write rapidly, and yet several people have died while I've written these lines. Some people have no courtesy.          ----- The dogs crawl up on the bed with me; I let them stay: My nearness means so much to them, so little to me.          ----- We care about every sparrow feather that falls. If not, we wouldn't need to invent a God to care and thus make it allright for us to forget to care.
Reaching out of himself, groping for mystery, the poet entered into and became a tree, the most interesting thing that every happened to that tree.          ----- A hole as small as a mustard seed in the cloudy, wavy glass: Girl's Locker Room window. Hope, like faith, moves mountains. Each boy takes a peak.          ----- Perhaps the sun imagines himself invisible because no matter how hard he shines, no one ever looks right at him. Though you never seem to see me, I must be content if, in my light, you can see one another.          ----- So attentive to his date, like a child ruining his first wrist watch by continual rewinding.          ----- Sex is like pinball: Poinnng! I take my shot and jiggle it a bit until your eyes light up and I am awarded a free game.          ----- Agents of rain follow me inside, concealed about my person - Aha! One of them drops from my hair, narrowly missing this notebook.          ----- I always tried to be the strong silent type, but no one noticed.          ----- The nut in the asylum who says he's God, he IS God. They put him away because he claimed to be hearing human voices.          ----- My friend practices Tai Chi. Invisible foes are shed on all sides, softly falling, petals from a rose, to perish smiling, as if waking from one dream to another.	You can't solve your problems by pretending they don't exist, but it helps to pretend they DO.          ----- Being myself is better than being someone else. I'd told myself this many times before, but someone else intercepted the message, so it never got to me.          ----- Let me ask you a purely academic question: Hello?          ----- What's a poet to do? There are only so many ways to say hello... so many ways...          ----- I lie in the grass. Trees spring up behind my head as the earth seeks to surround me, and the brave blue arch of sky staves it off like the stick holding open the jaws of a crocodile.          ----- This morning, thinking about the future, I put on my left shoe, then had to take it off so I could put on my pants. When did that last happen? NEVER to ME! Long ago to a child. Has it been so long since I had a future?          ----- I lead an obscure life. No one has ever heard of me. I hope the world will profit by my example.          ----- My trouble is I'm way over my head.          ----- If I dial the right number and you're home, you'll answer. Why else do you have a phone? And so I keep writing, thinking, why else do they have a language?
Perhaps when I say "you", I mean myself. All the more reason to hope for an answer.          ----- I made a purple hippopotamus, gave it wings and said "Fly!" It lurched forward, flapped sluggishly and collapsed. "I'm much too heavy to fly!" it bellowed. With my finger I flicked him out the window and began to build a better hippopotamus.          ----- When you say something to me that is cruel or stupid, I am hurt because of the million things I have to say to you that, suddenly, cannot be said. When I myself say or do something cruel or stupid, I am swept back on an afterwave of loss of the million things I no longer have to say.          ----- The dog sprawls on the couch as if dead, head hanging off the edge, paws bent limply in the air. If, from across two rooms, I look at him or even, sharply, THINK of him, his tail twitches. If my attention persists, tail thumps against the couch, backwards-hanging head opens round, upside-down quizzical brown eyes that find me and hold me while torso and legs tentatively stretch themselves off the couch and carry quick-talking tail and homing head to where I sit, where, if I don't reach, long tapered muzzle nuzzles under my wrist and wedges head beneath hand - I could refuse it, but would that be fair? I CALLED him, didn't I?          ----- A lint ball hangs on an invisible thread beneath the picture frame. With the tip of my pen I brush it free. It falls, catches, hangs by an invisible thread an inch above the floor: Prudent acrobat - you had a net!	Chirp! Chirp! The sparrows splat sidewalks and cartops with tiny white chirp marks.          ----- Hard to write in the laundromat with half my attention on what the machines are doing to my clothes. How can a quiet poet hope to compete with professional agitators?          ----- Today the sun has stopped dead still in the noon sky. We are all feverishly winding our watches.          ----- Once again I dial a number and you are there, so far away that if I tried to point at you, I would miss by several landscapes; three hours away - you could be anywhere, at the end of any or no number (it's like tugging at one thread sticking out of an immense ball of threads with millions of loose ends every which way and having the end attached to you respond to my tug). You could be a wrong number, wrong country, wrong century; you could say, "There's no me at this number," or "I'm afraid you have the wrong you" or "The number you have dialed is illegal; at the sound of the beep you will be vaporized" or you could be a busy signal. To find you once is miraculous, again and again, absurd.          ----- The faces of enemy soldiers (under funny helmets) could be our faces. We fire, hoping to shatter the mirror, but no glass breaks, only shattered eyes and lips mirror still our own.          ----- Window with no shade if anyone sees me naked, it serves them right.          ----- Full moon; the whole family gathers to view the TV screen.
Half awake, I explain something amusing to my wife, who grunts softly. Waking, I know I only dreamt I spoke to her. I tell her what I'd told her in my dream - she grunts the same grunt.          ----- A chicken is a gawky irregular lump. The egg all alabaster serene brow - THERE'S your highly evolved life form, probably very wise, too, though inscrutable - until, like a barbarian horde carousing through a shattered basilica arrive the chickens.          ----- Avoiding the mud till out-flanked. Kiss! Kiss! Spring makes moist love to shy shoes.          ----- Why must I sleep nights? Don't they want me to catch them changing the numbers on the date?          ----- Boy so intent on pissing - tries to cover the water with bubbles.          ----- I'm here to see the ocean - I ran all the way! Did I miss anything?          ----- "He died for our sins." I wish it were that easy - that I could help you just by dying for you. No - for your sins you must fully confront each one, and I must see you through it.          ----- The physical universe rambles on, Satisfied that I am attentive because I pretend to take notes, while actually I scribble this gossip to pass around to my classmates.	Watch your step - a thin crust of snow conceals the crevasses; you could enter a poem and never leave.          ----- Though my body is 92% water and 98% liquid, I am careful to dry it after a shower, and I always wear dry clothing. Perhaps we developed such habits so that we can more easily detect leaks.          ----- I just bit my tongue. Calls are pouring in from all over my nervous system. Who would have thought it? marvels my tongue, Thank you for you concern, I love you all!          ----- At a movie by myself. Why not? Don't you go to this poem alone?          ----- We kissed long and hard - it is not easy to learn a foreign tongue.          ----- I have no trouble loving my neighbor as myself. It's harder to love him as HIMself.          ----- From humble beginnings God grew up to be us.          ----- My friends are all magic: When I believe bad reports of them, they turn into toads.          ----- The things you think are wrong with you are only wrong where they are not you.