Originally posted August 7th, 2011
By Michael Konik
When you walk into a room, the dining room let’s say for the sake of useful metaphor, her solitude is silent, screaming mutely and crying in the quiet.
The loneliness of the orchid.
The stillness of the table. The gentle droop, a swan’s neck, a dancer’s bow to the enveloping sound of love.
Cursed with wakefulness, the flowers cannot sleep. The talking goes on and then some more, shuffling the proper order of things. Renovating the piquant plan that our unseen hand once imagined in a fever fit. Ceaselessly yearning for light and the enveloping sound of love.
We can’t know her any more than ourselves. She’s white and frail and open, vulnerable to cold and cruelty. Her language is a mystery.
We can feel her. She is lonely.
You had no sister, only promises. And when the end came, messy and unhappy and not at all how you would . . . → Read More: Poem: The Loneliness of the Orchid
Originally posted August 30th, 2009
By Michael Konik
Explain if you’re able to a little girl no older than you were when you discovered that pets don’t live forever (or grandmas, or daddies) that no one will die tonight in this speeding metal tube filled with people who don’t look or smell or sound like her family but who, like her family, have mothers and father and dogs and cats who also will not live forever.
Physics and math are elegant and unimpeachable, but they’re comically unconvincing
to a mind that is still accepting Bible stories
and fairy tales about princesses in castles.
Tell her that the air is water and that we are all swimming through it, and when she wonders why everything won’t sink to the bottom, as it seems to do in the ocean and her neighbor Ellie’s pool, try to think fast.
You said you couldn’t wait for me to come . . . → Read More: Poem: Flying
We're really sorry about our most recent trading loss. People will say we require more oversight, and, in this case, maybe they're right. It shouldn't have happened, and we'll take steps to make sure it doesn't happen for a third time.
The $4,000 or so ($4,882) of your money that we failed to bring back from our annual company trip to Hollywood Park Racetrack and Casino will in... Read More-->
If you’re reading this essay on MichaelKonik.com, you know that this is a reliable place to find “me,” the me who shares his ideas with the world, whether or not any part of the world is interested. This is where I unilaterally invade my privacy, allowing strangers...
North Korea is launching rockets, Syria is slaughtering its citizens, and the Filipino community is organizing a massive get-out-the-vote campaign for a crucial election (not for something boring and unimportant like a public office but a cause that’s got folks passionately engaged: the American Idol finals). So...
Sometimes our chaotic, unknowable, seemingly random Universe arranges itself with perfect symmetry. In these moments of bracing clarity, authored by a Creator (in whatever guise or nomenclature you prefer) whose sense of irony is matched only by her/his/its sense of wicked humor, our innate foolishness and learned...
Poet Robert Pinsky. Pianist Laurence Hobgood. Text, music, and the moment -- what we hear on the new POEMJAZZ recording is two giant artists making something greater than the sum of its parts. While Pinsky recites his lovely words with his unlovely (but weirdly attractive) voice, Hobgood, the longtime arranger and accompanist [...]
