One Dollar Plants One Tree

Let's do something good for the world.

You Tube Clip from our Dub Poetry Workshop

I am so pleased to be able to share this clip from our Dub Poetry/Music Event that took place at our college in January. Our special guest was Jamaican jazz guitarist Maurice Gordon, but this clip features a young man from Aruka, British Guyana, (now studying at Claflin), who did a spontaneous song for us called "I Need Your Love Every Time, Jesus." He was one of the band members who just showed up from various local colleges and the community to form a last-minute band on the stage with Maurice. It was just too cool. The video is shaky because we did it ourselves, and we are just learning, but we are pleased to be able to reach students where they live --- on YouTube, MySpace, Facebook, and MOG ! We will be posting students performing their dub poems over the coming weeks; this is our first effort.

Music for Thursday reflection --- Jaco Pastorius on Guitar

This Silver Lining

I finally got my picture on the cover of the Rolling Stone. Ha ha. By the way, did you know Johnny Depp has been on the cover of RS six times???!!

extraordinarypoems

extraordinarypoems

My Music Blog at MOG.com, if anyone is interested in checking out some groovy music.

Candy Valentine

What a sweet day!

Candy Hearts

I eat them at the bar instead of popcorn now,
eat hearts by the handful, hearts with messages
I skip, hearts that beat sugar beats

oh sugar sugar
oh honey honey
you are my candy girl
and you got me wanting you

but occasionally I pause to read one,
to see if it has easy- to- follow directions
that could make love simple
or just something promising

like "I hope."

How to Have a Great Monday Morning

Dear Patient: This prescription takes approximately thirty minutes.

Awake at 6 a.m. and prepare hot chai with vanilla soy milk and one packet of Splenda. Eat a low-fact (or, low fat --- aren't typos funny sometimes?) cinnamon graham cracker while waiting for chai to cool. Take the chai to your home office or wherever the computer is stashed. Play an online game, preferably Scrabble so you can get some words in your head first thing:

fable
suede
vault

and others

Read a passage or two from J.D. Salinger's "Seymour: An Introduction."

Oh, you want an example:

"It seems to me indisputably true that a good many people, the wide world over, of varying ages, cultures, natural endowments, respond with a special impetus, a zing, even, in some cases, to artists and poets who as well as having a reputation for producing great or fine art have something garishly Wrong with them as persons: a spectacular flaw in character or citizenship, a construably romantic affliction or addiction --- extreme self-centeredness, marital infidelity, stone-deafness, stone-blindness, a terrible thirst, a mortally bad cough, a soft spot for prostitutes, a partiality for grand-scale adultery or incest, a certified or uncertified weakness for opium or sodomy, and so on, God have mercy on the lonely bastards."

(Thus, Amy Winehouse takes the Grammies. And I love Amy Winehouse.)



Answer a few e-mails and write a few shiny new unsolicited ones.

Finally, for exactly three minutes, sit in front of a mirror with a 32 fl oz bottle of Miracle Bubbles, and blow bubbles at yourself.

Happy Monday, Everybody!

A Not Ungrateful Theme

Spanish Guitar