This is a note now to my blog readers. Few of you know I have written poetry my entire adult life since the the age of eighteen. Well, that’s hardly earthshaking, now is it?
Two observations I wish to share as an opener here: (a) the years of my life are not exactly chronicled in these poems but with work - which I have now done - they have a story to tell; and (b) having them published has never fueled the writing of the poems (which therefore had but one audience member - myself - to satisfy).
Recently, I decided to sign a contract with Friesen Press which holds itself out to those who in fact are not looking for a vanity press experience, and yet do not have ready access to traditional and established book publishers. Friesen like a traditional publisher also can refuse the authors who can not come to grips with the realities of a contract relationship with a publisher. What Friesen does is leave its author's in position to exploit publication avenues both traditional and new. I have now chosen between traditional retail bookstores and the online world (more about that choice from me will come later).
The contract with Friesen requires that I choose (which meant I had a business decision to make). The balance between the two domains for booksales is slight. The traditional booksellers take a huge chunk of the proceeds (55%) leaving 10% for the author for a royalty payment. The online world can offer upwards of 40% for the author royalty with the online retailer taking just 25% of the proceeds. The market place, if honestly logical, would pay me ultimately the same royalty gross regardless of which pathway I should choose. Alas, the world is not so perfectly inclined (and I am no business major to know better).
What is at risk here is a significant financial investment on my part, which in hindsight I actually value as an incentive (much like being dropped into a wilderness and then having to survive in the wilds). The reason is that once I decided to invest in my book of poems, the making of the book required that the poems reach a higher level of finesse and refinement as part of a larger effort, the book of poems itself.
This is just a start in communicating to you what is going to happen very soon. You will be able to buy a book (paperback or hardback) or ebook of my poetry collection entitled Down the Highway, a Peace.
When I perform the poems live, I will sell books and autograph them and collect the payment for the book. One day if I work myself into being a performer of my poems, I believe I will yet have a return on my investment, not only in dollars paid to Friesen Press but also the personal investment in writing poems that I ultimately saw fit to share with the world at large (which clearly has no interest in these poems which are not especially learned or academic or approved literature but hopefully insightful and entertaining and inspiring too).
Rest assured, my dear readers, the fate of my book as I send it (my erstwhile child) into the world is not dependent on your buying my book. Should you read it one day (even if it was only a used book copy or library copy) do let me know if I entertained you for a good read and a solid elucidation of this life. Or better yet recommend it to a friend or fellow reader.
We are after all partakers of a culture that is premised on beauty and passion and realization of what it means to be fully human, flawed, broken, and yet so very much alive to possibility and to love, albeit a dog or a cat or humanity itself. When next I write you on this blog, it will be to share with you the news of a publication date certain (which should be known to me shortly).
Rick Hilber
Thursday, May 21, 2015
Friday, May 15, 2015
Have a great day!
Dear Reader.
One supposes that another who has achieved an advance stage of enlightenment
Does not have to contend with the purely obstructionist character of reality.
The Sage of Past Passions and Meaningless Intellectual Astuteness sends you his healing waves of compassion.
If you read a little deeper in my blog today, a poem and an essay for reflection await you. Have a great day.
Rick Hilber
One supposes that another who has achieved an advance stage of enlightenment
Does not have to contend with the purely obstructionist character of reality.
The Sage of Past Passions and Meaningless Intellectual Astuteness sends you his healing waves of compassion.
If you read a little deeper in my blog today, a poem and an essay for reflection await you. Have a great day.
Rick Hilber
So Alone in Your Room - Not!
Sweat Sixteen
by Rick Hilber
Does anyone know? Does anyone care
What your situation is out there?
Your church has shunned you
For having accused its elder
Of sexual impropriety.
Your child asks, “What’s that?”
Does anyone know? Does anyone care
What your situation is out there?
The home paid for back in 2009
With your child’s death benefit
Your former wife now has lost,
Lost as she always has been in a stupor.
Does anyone know? Does anyone care
What your situation is out there?
Suspended from duty, you exclaim,
For shooting dead a homeless man
Who pulled a knife when startled by your stick.
What do you do for your badge of honor?
Does anyone know? Does anyone care
What your situation is out there?
Told at the V.A. to suck it up,
The daughter home at last
Sleeps in night sweats
Back in Afghanistan.
Does anyone know? Does anyone care
What your situation is out there?
Sixteen long years she took to die,
Living for others in the moment,
Your child’s abandoned you now.
Has she really ever left, you wonder?
Does anyone know? Does anyone care
What your situation is out there?
News of your only child in prison
Is that he’s started on ministry
To wash himself first of his shame,
A comfort to others just the same.
Does anyone know? Does anyone care
What your situation is out there?
Your teenager who handed off a gun
To the police officer back in 3rd Grade,
Now reads in the paper its use
In the homicide of a child.
Does anyone know? Does anyone care
What your situation is out there?
A former spouse who absconded
With your life savings calls you
Out of the blue for a night’s stay,
But you send him away by rights.
Does anyone know? Does anyone care
What your situation is out there?
You’ve been a john in a sting,
Shut out of your home too,
A shame to your children.
Allowed home again? What chance?
Does anyone know? Does anyone care
What your situation is out there?
What help all that practice of meekness
When stopped on the freeway
For a taillight that was out, or not,
And thrown to the pavement and cuffed?
Does anyone know? Does anyone care
What your situation is out there?
Trapped in a sadness, a room without exit,
You weep for the suffering of others
Safe in your room, safe but alone,
But not without a paper and a pen.
Does anyone know? Does anyone care
What your situation is out there?
Your seminary committee
Refused you ordination for
Your spiritual reservations,
Or was it for mental aberrations.
Does anyone know? Does anyone care
What your situation is out there?
Your husband makes a living
Selling worthless bonds he’s said
Defrauding the simple minded
With his familiar seductive charm.
Does anyone know? Does anyone care
What your situation is out there?
I hear they consider you an early senile,
They who now vote down public education,
The same for whom you funded private lessons
And the ones you segregated in exclusive academies.
Does anyone know? Does anyone care
What your situation is out there?
Your boss refuses you a living wage
While his limousine idles in the lot
And his trophy wife rules from home
That no one is to blame, he parrots.
Does anyone know? Does anyone care
What your situation is out there?
Let me take you by the hand,
We are not alone I say.
We have shared what we each have,
What little we have with another.
©2015 by Richard J. (Rick) Hilber.
All rights reserved.
by Rick Hilber
Does anyone know? Does anyone care
What your situation is out there?
Your church has shunned you
For having accused its elder
Of sexual impropriety.
Your child asks, “What’s that?”
Does anyone know? Does anyone care
What your situation is out there?
The home paid for back in 2009
With your child’s death benefit
Your former wife now has lost,
Lost as she always has been in a stupor.
Does anyone know? Does anyone care
What your situation is out there?
Suspended from duty, you exclaim,
For shooting dead a homeless man
Who pulled a knife when startled by your stick.
What do you do for your badge of honor?
Does anyone know? Does anyone care
What your situation is out there?
Told at the V.A. to suck it up,
The daughter home at last
Sleeps in night sweats
Back in Afghanistan.
Does anyone know? Does anyone care
What your situation is out there?
Sixteen long years she took to die,
Living for others in the moment,
Your child’s abandoned you now.
Has she really ever left, you wonder?
Does anyone know? Does anyone care
What your situation is out there?
News of your only child in prison
Is that he’s started on ministry
To wash himself first of his shame,
A comfort to others just the same.
Does anyone know? Does anyone care
What your situation is out there?
Your teenager who handed off a gun
To the police officer back in 3rd Grade,
Now reads in the paper its use
In the homicide of a child.
Does anyone know? Does anyone care
What your situation is out there?
A former spouse who absconded
With your life savings calls you
Out of the blue for a night’s stay,
But you send him away by rights.
Does anyone know? Does anyone care
What your situation is out there?
You’ve been a john in a sting,
Shut out of your home too,
A shame to your children.
Allowed home again? What chance?
Does anyone know? Does anyone care
What your situation is out there?
What help all that practice of meekness
When stopped on the freeway
For a taillight that was out, or not,
And thrown to the pavement and cuffed?
Does anyone know? Does anyone care
What your situation is out there?
Trapped in a sadness, a room without exit,
You weep for the suffering of others
Safe in your room, safe but alone,
But not without a paper and a pen.
Does anyone know? Does anyone care
What your situation is out there?
Your seminary committee
Refused you ordination for
Your spiritual reservations,
Or was it for mental aberrations.
Does anyone know? Does anyone care
What your situation is out there?
Your husband makes a living
Selling worthless bonds he’s said
Defrauding the simple minded
With his familiar seductive charm.
Does anyone know? Does anyone care
What your situation is out there?
I hear they consider you an early senile,
They who now vote down public education,
The same for whom you funded private lessons
And the ones you segregated in exclusive academies.
Does anyone know? Does anyone care
What your situation is out there?
Your boss refuses you a living wage
While his limousine idles in the lot
And his trophy wife rules from home
That no one is to blame, he parrots.
Does anyone know? Does anyone care
What your situation is out there?
Let me take you by the hand,
We are not alone I say.
We have shared what we each have,
What little we have with another.
©2015 by Richard J. (Rick) Hilber.
All rights reserved.
America's for the Downtrodden to Step on Someone Else for a While
America’s for the Downtrodden to Step on Someone Else for a While
By Rick Hilber
I live in a housing cooperative. I am a shareholder in the corporation that is my landlord. I am a tenant. This is as close as anyone wants to come in my country to being a communist. That is communist with a small “c” and without the attitude about religion which makes communism a religion of godless materialism (which is what capitalism is in one’s disinterested understanding of economics). The essence here is the difference between being well and doing well and having it “all”. I think the real point I have to make is buried under way too much human detritus!
Americans are not communists, and my life in my cooperative has firmly established in my mind that we have no business trying to live like a community of owners who have to defer to the collective will. But beyond that and the histrionics of being driven mad by selfishness among co-owners, I have reached the firm conviction that communism (with a small “c”) is like capitalism (oops, another “c” word), both of which have winners and losers. The winners end up with all the marbles, and the rest of us have our soup lines. Boy, is that my punch line, or what?
What that looks like is - Joseph Stalin on one side and Andrew Carnegie on the other. They are both bad for the environment, degrading it, and subverting it to their own self-aggrandizement. Such is the human condition. To prove my point Joseph Stalin ended up in both a hot and a cold war, the hot war with a maniacal dictator like himself, and the other with western capitalism over who has what and who isn’t going to get it or “any” for that matter! By the way, Joe’s statues make good grapeshot, and Andrew’s philanthropy makes western Christianity look like redemption itself!
Remember, those of you who read, that Warren Buffett, capitalist par excellence, knows beyond knowing that you can’t take “it” with you, and leaving it to your children and grandchildren will destroy what cogency they each should have as worthwhile human beings! I think I know why Warren has gotten it right. At ninety plus years of life, he and his buddy Charles T. Munger, did it together. They were always about the fun of getting, not having and spending for itself, and as I would have it, about being, not having. Warren knows that if one is into having, what you have will have you! You would spend all your time worrying about others trying to take from you what you have accumulated, for one thing! For me to find a communist of similar wisdom, I have to go back to St. Benedict, and the root of monasticism, the desert fathers of the early Church (that would be what the early Christian religion reduced itself to when the world itself had been had by the Roman Empire which is the triumph of a bunch of white guys over everybody else - much like our Wall Street crowd which ironically takes welfare bail outs as needed).
Our modern atheists do have a little connumdrum. They can buy into having or being. If they deal with the ethics of that, I am amazed at how Christian communists and Christian capitalists end up in the same place. On the other hand: our modern Christians do seem to shoot themselves in the foot if they lose sight of the economic premise of Jesus Christ himself, the one who originally taught us that being, not having, is probably fifty-one percent of human capacity to be a higher life form than a snake!
So what is this essay trying to say? I’ll tell you in a nut shell. Doing what is right by yourself and your neighbor (or enemy) is what defines us as a higher life form. It takes thoughtfulness, and it takes mindfulness, and it takes mercy both for yourself and another. Marriage is I think the best example of that of which I speak. I for one wasted at least half of my married days focused on having a wife to keep (which I am miserable at doing) and being a husband (which oddly enough doesn’t even need a wife to keep to be fully enacted, lived out, and appreciated).
The best things in life are free and without appreciation either (which means no one else wants them). Been on an early morning walk and watched the sunrise lately? It will be you and maybe just one other on the high bridge over Saint Paul (that would be the city) watching the sun rise over the hills of Pigs Eye Lake just past the airport where the corporate jets are coming in for that really, really big meeting on the fortieth floor of the Wells Fargo building.
So today, be a dad, be a grandfather, be a lover of humanity. Don’t suffer even one minute about what you do or don’t have (including advantages over others), and walk in humility and confidence into the day which by the way God created just for you to be your very best self. If you should read this, it is my self-talk (that would be No. 307) and is not available for other than the sharing it with others. God bless you too for that sharing of hard earned wisdom - should it be in you to pass it on (the “it” being love of your fellows while you are yet here, not above [heaven’s for Christians only I hear], or down under the ground - which is after all our common lot).
Oh yah, one last thing. Don’t bother sharing this with a politician. They will parrot it back to you if they know it’s what you want to hear. Geez, is democracy not great? They even pay you for your vote! A young guy stops me on the street to ask if he can join the Tea Party. I tell him to stay away from the facts, do not subscribe to more than one newstation’s point of view, and let pundits pander to your worst fears about minorities, women, and immigrants. That should do it, I tell him. He walks off with a smile on his face, and looks back at me and says, “Coming from a overeducated bum, that’s not half bad!”
©2015 by its author Richard J. (Rick) HIlber
By Rick Hilber
I live in a housing cooperative. I am a shareholder in the corporation that is my landlord. I am a tenant. This is as close as anyone wants to come in my country to being a communist. That is communist with a small “c” and without the attitude about religion which makes communism a religion of godless materialism (which is what capitalism is in one’s disinterested understanding of economics). The essence here is the difference between being well and doing well and having it “all”. I think the real point I have to make is buried under way too much human detritus!
Americans are not communists, and my life in my cooperative has firmly established in my mind that we have no business trying to live like a community of owners who have to defer to the collective will. But beyond that and the histrionics of being driven mad by selfishness among co-owners, I have reached the firm conviction that communism (with a small “c”) is like capitalism (oops, another “c” word), both of which have winners and losers. The winners end up with all the marbles, and the rest of us have our soup lines. Boy, is that my punch line, or what?
What that looks like is - Joseph Stalin on one side and Andrew Carnegie on the other. They are both bad for the environment, degrading it, and subverting it to their own self-aggrandizement. Such is the human condition. To prove my point Joseph Stalin ended up in both a hot and a cold war, the hot war with a maniacal dictator like himself, and the other with western capitalism over who has what and who isn’t going to get it or “any” for that matter! By the way, Joe’s statues make good grapeshot, and Andrew’s philanthropy makes western Christianity look like redemption itself!
Remember, those of you who read, that Warren Buffett, capitalist par excellence, knows beyond knowing that you can’t take “it” with you, and leaving it to your children and grandchildren will destroy what cogency they each should have as worthwhile human beings! I think I know why Warren has gotten it right. At ninety plus years of life, he and his buddy Charles T. Munger, did it together. They were always about the fun of getting, not having and spending for itself, and as I would have it, about being, not having. Warren knows that if one is into having, what you have will have you! You would spend all your time worrying about others trying to take from you what you have accumulated, for one thing! For me to find a communist of similar wisdom, I have to go back to St. Benedict, and the root of monasticism, the desert fathers of the early Church (that would be what the early Christian religion reduced itself to when the world itself had been had by the Roman Empire which is the triumph of a bunch of white guys over everybody else - much like our Wall Street crowd which ironically takes welfare bail outs as needed).
Our modern atheists do have a little connumdrum. They can buy into having or being. If they deal with the ethics of that, I am amazed at how Christian communists and Christian capitalists end up in the same place. On the other hand: our modern Christians do seem to shoot themselves in the foot if they lose sight of the economic premise of Jesus Christ himself, the one who originally taught us that being, not having, is probably fifty-one percent of human capacity to be a higher life form than a snake!
So what is this essay trying to say? I’ll tell you in a nut shell. Doing what is right by yourself and your neighbor (or enemy) is what defines us as a higher life form. It takes thoughtfulness, and it takes mindfulness, and it takes mercy both for yourself and another. Marriage is I think the best example of that of which I speak. I for one wasted at least half of my married days focused on having a wife to keep (which I am miserable at doing) and being a husband (which oddly enough doesn’t even need a wife to keep to be fully enacted, lived out, and appreciated).
The best things in life are free and without appreciation either (which means no one else wants them). Been on an early morning walk and watched the sunrise lately? It will be you and maybe just one other on the high bridge over Saint Paul (that would be the city) watching the sun rise over the hills of Pigs Eye Lake just past the airport where the corporate jets are coming in for that really, really big meeting on the fortieth floor of the Wells Fargo building.
So today, be a dad, be a grandfather, be a lover of humanity. Don’t suffer even one minute about what you do or don’t have (including advantages over others), and walk in humility and confidence into the day which by the way God created just for you to be your very best self. If you should read this, it is my self-talk (that would be No. 307) and is not available for other than the sharing it with others. God bless you too for that sharing of hard earned wisdom - should it be in you to pass it on (the “it” being love of your fellows while you are yet here, not above [heaven’s for Christians only I hear], or down under the ground - which is after all our common lot).
Oh yah, one last thing. Don’t bother sharing this with a politician. They will parrot it back to you if they know it’s what you want to hear. Geez, is democracy not great? They even pay you for your vote! A young guy stops me on the street to ask if he can join the Tea Party. I tell him to stay away from the facts, do not subscribe to more than one newstation’s point of view, and let pundits pander to your worst fears about minorities, women, and immigrants. That should do it, I tell him. He walks off with a smile on his face, and looks back at me and says, “Coming from a overeducated bum, that’s not half bad!”
©2015 by its author Richard J. (Rick) HIlber
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