Remembering – Page 24 – Neil Meili

Neil Meili

Zen Cowboy Poet & Freelance Philosopher

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Category: Remembering

Mom, Happy Birthday

Audio Recordings, Farm, Nostalgia, Ranch Life, Relationships, Remembering / tagged Love, Mother / October 3, 2019 / by neil_2015_wordpress@neilmeili.com

Oh we would circle
rattling tin-wheeled trucks and trikes
and drive her crying to her bed

Gather soot enough from here and there
to keep her forever scrubbing
at our souls and skins

And worry her near to death
while she stayed up to worry us alive
from many a snow and beer-filled drive

I know she does it to this day
and I’m afraid anything else I’d say
would all be mush and love
and angels watching from above
and yet still, I think I will

Thinking of my Mom today, on what would have been her 102nd birthday.

Grandpa’s Upstairs Porch

Nature, Nostalgia, Ranch Life, Relationships, Remembering / September 26, 2019 / by neil_2015_wordpress@neilmeili.com

The only scenery was sky
the only light was lightning

Five of us sibled summer nights
blanketed against the cooling air

Watching storms from forever away
til they rained us to our beds

1 Reply

9-11 (September)

Haiku, Remembering / tagged 9-11, Children / September 11, 2019 / by neil_2015_wordpress@neilmeili.com

Eighteen years later – children still asking why

New York September
Two new holes in the sky
Children ask why

Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash

Kenny and Me

Audio Recordings, Cowboy Poetry, Farm, Ranch Life, Relationships, Remembering / tagged Beer, Harvest, Youth / September 10, 2019 / by neil_2015_wordpress@neilmeili.com

Ranching at Eighteen
Together we were young
and strong and very bold
and together we could drink
more beer than we could hold

We could drive home late and fast
singing every Johnny Horton song
Then fall asleep for minutes
and still answer the morning gong

We would work it out in the hot hot sun
(so easy then did the poisons yield)
As we sweated bales with pitch forks
and passed gas
in a thousand acre field

Chinese Restaurant

Nostalgia, Ranch Life, Remembering, Travel / August 28, 2019 / by neil_2015_wordpress@neilmeili.com

Sorry John Donne
but some men may be islands

or castaways
in small prairie towns
fifty miles by bad road
from any other of their race

Tall walled booths along one side
twisted-wire chairs and tables too
my father and his friends had coffee
I think mine was cream soda

We may have eaten there
but I don’t remember
certainly at five or six
I would not have imagined
that we were as strange to him
as he was to us

All I ever knew
of the inner man
was the pungent foreignness
of the old two-holer out back
Fast forward six years or so
to small town of Mossbank
on the south side of the lake

A chubby twelve year old
sits in a low walled booth
with his best buddies
and another Chinese man
in another Chinese café
serves up Vanilla Cokes
(when vanilla still had alcohol)
and marks our tabs with
Chinese signs

I asked him what my three mean

Big – Small – Happy

1 Reply

Black Beauty

Audio Recordings, Farm, Nostalgia, Ranch Life, Remembering / tagged Cats / August 27, 2019 / by neil_2015_wordpress@neilmeili.com

When we moved to Grandfather’s
old farm
no one had been living there for a while
and all the cats had gone wild

We found a litter of kittens
hidden deep in a corner of the loft
and among them
the most beautiful black and white kitten

Spitting and crouching under the eaves
she scratched us all to the bone
If I’d been a tree there would
have been six rings

Much persistence and we got her out
much time and love and we tamed her
if one ever really tames a cat
Best cat ever
adopted by our cousins when we moved
and one of the things we most looked forward
to on our visits was Black Beauty and her newest of who knew how many litters

The tomcats in that town were also
excellent judges of beauty

Rule Britannica

Nostalgia, Remembering / July 23, 2019 / by neil_2015_wordpress@neilmeili.com

Mostly musty now
Google-buried deep in library stacks
and garage sale ‘take it for a dollar’ boxes

Generations denied the pleasure
of sitting with a volume
rich and heavy to the hand

And knowing you could know
everything there was to know
about whatever started with an M
through whatever started with an O

Image by Michal Jarmoluk from Pixabay

Small Town Grief

Remembering / tagged Death, Media Overload, Small Town / July 17, 2019 / by neil_2015_wordpress@neilmeili.com

When a boy in our school died
from a word we could say but not spell
it was the only death to count

There was no tv to diminish by compare
and spread our grief so thin
it would not cover him

2 Replies

Diary

Remembering / tagged Secrets / June 27, 2019 / by neil_2015_wordpress@neilmeili.com

If I’d had a diary
I could have called it Dear

\And told it all the stories
that no-one cared to hear

April in Austin

Audio Recordings, Environment, Haiku, Nature, Nostalgia, Remembering / tagged Laurel / April 23, 2019 / by neil_2015_wordpress@neilmeili.com

After the rain
mountain laurel become
lilacs of childhood

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Thanks for the story Sandi, And bet he is and that I would have liked him Neil
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Ha!!!

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