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November 5th used to make me think of this old rhyme inspired by Guy Fawkes Day (the V for Vendetta mask is based on Guy Fawkes), which was the whole failed attempt to blow up Parliament and assassinate the king thing: “Remember, remember, the 5th of November.”
But now it will always remind me of my dad.
This is the 1st anniversary of his passing on November 5th last year and I could keep it political, like the above Guy Fawkes reference, and say he blasted out of here on Election Day 2024 in his own version of Guy Fawkes before seeing how atrocious and sad things could get, but I’d instead rather share three of my favorite memories of him here today to remember him on this day.
In some ways, my dad gets a lot of credit for how I learned to read. I always think of it as rare now because Dad was not a big reader, though he was always mechanically gifted and could make things with his hands that he never ever even made blueprints for. He just apparently saw it in his brain and put it together on the fly. But he must have known I really wanted to read from me staring at comic books all day pre-k or kindergarten, but not knowing how to read the words. So, he started to read with me through an old read-along-to-the-audio Star Wars book and underlined words I’d have a hard time with. We spent quite a lot of time on that battered old leather armchair of his doing this. As some time went by, not only did I know the story by heart, but all the underlined words too, and the underlines started disappearing once I knew what they meant. I like to say now I learned to read from Dick and Jane and C-3PO.
A second favorite memory:
Sometimes as a kid, when I needed a bath or got dirty from playing outside, he’d do the classic Dad thing of throwing me up onto his shoulders and hauling me into the bathroom. He’d face the mirror and say something like, “Hey, I wish I knew where Bret went to. Where’d he go?” He’d take a swipe or two at my face with a small damp towel. “Oh, wait! I think that’s his nose! Where’d the rest of him go?” I’d laugh like crazy. I don’t always realize it but find myself doing a similar thing with my girls too. And they laugh just the same.
Third favorite memory:
When I was helping him at the start of his landscaping company after he retired from farming, he once said to me, “I believe you’re going to get to wherever you want to go… even if it takes you a long time to get there.” I think this was one of the nicest things he’d ever said to me. And you know, I’m not fast at most things, and I may not entirely be there yet… but I do believe him.
Bonus memory:
My dad and I were often very different people with very different tastes in life. But one thing we could agree on always was, of all things… Creedence Clearwater Revival.
When I moved to Florida, he rode with me, driving down from North Dakota in my car, pulling his little trailer. At the time, I hated country music and my Dad hated rock music, so we never could agree on a damn thing on the radio or otherwise. But then he realized I had a “20 Greatest Hits” Creedence Clearwater Revival CD in my car, and put that in. It played the entire 2 or 3-day drive down and every time I tried to change it, he’d say, “Just play it again. Play it one more time.” Once more became 20 more “once mores.”
Never underestimate the power of CCR. Thinking about him today, so my workday playlist may include a little “Lodi” and “Who Will Stop the Rain?” And maybe, just maybe, some of his beloved Patsy Cline.
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I Am a Ghost (But a Ghost with a Purpose!)
I realize I have been ghosting my own webpage here since the beginning of June! Well, summer is busy with my little family and my girls, but I still have been writing that whole time! Much of it, however, has been practicing the book, The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron, again, and lots and lots and lots of journal pages (Morning Pages, as she calls them) to revamp my creativity and hopefully bring it to a new level. Well, that, and it just feels good to do the exercises in that book. Highly recommended if you’re feeling blocked creatively in any endeavor. It really works if you practice it!
In other news… I am applying for Creative Writing programs and am excited to see where that leads. More will be revealed!
Blessings, all.
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Three other personal favorites posted here in honor of May’s 12-year anniversary of The Oxytocin Opera (Click Here to Find It!) “Coda” and “Encore” are the last two poems in the collection. It really takes me back to writing them by posting some of these collection pieces this month. Until next time, enjoy!
Another Ocean Poem
The lull of the waves… it doesn’t say your name like it used to.
But sometimes the moon, hanging like a rusting chandelier, sometimes it highlights the letters of your name on foaming crests of breaking waves.
There are the ghosts of ancient heroes riding on the wind, and exhausted mythologies lie broken inside sea shells and within the bones of the sand.
And I’m still not sure where the buried treasure lies. I’ve never seen an Ex that clearly marked the spot.
But if I lie on this shore and close my eyes, the shapes and names of all the people I’ve ever known light up behind lightless lids. They will be safe in there and I’m happy to keep them.
There are some words inside my head I’ve hushed so many times that maybe they won’t ever really speak anymore, even if I start to miss them.
I wish some of our words would have sounded prettier.
There are some thoughts I’m more afraid of than the feelings they build in me like sandcastles, knowing a wave is coming for them someday, they just don’t know when and how.
There is a slapstick comedy buried somewhere in my right hand, yet its bones don’t always remember the words and lines.
And far below the waves, there are bodies hiding within seaweed and secrets, too young and clinging to the ocean floor like barnacles on a boat.
If you could find them and touch them, they would sting worse than a thousand jellyfish.
If they decided to surface now from these Atlantic tombs, heads rising like miniature submarines to reach unbent light, maybe they would watch me watching the moon on the shore, waves licking my bare feet like a grateful dog’s tongue after its Master comes home for the evening.
Maybe they would watch me with eyes that never saw, and maybe they would say in virgin tongues, “Well, where have you been? The water’s perfect. Come on in.”
There is a select collection of unused names living under my tongue.
I’ve been happy to keep them safe there.
I whisper the names, let them fall to be carried with the smells of the ocean air to other shorelines.
To be laid to rest with those bodies of the sea.
They wink, smile and sink and are glad to now hold my unused names like Blackbeard’s buried treasure.
Because no one should go have to go through death without knowing a name to answer to.Coda
Are all these notes nothing
more than a decision to live
with a fuller love found
inside a firewall of code?
Despite what you have heard and seen,
there was laughter streaking
down apartment and house walls,
like fresh paint with not enough surface
to hold on to.
A crescendo of smiles and clutched hands
powered these rooms
like two matching solar panels
on the roof holding
all daylight.
Just like you know
that Styrofoam and Paper Mache
tombstones on dry, late October lawns
symbolize much more than a post harvest holiday
your children and friends love to play dress up for.
How you know that behind these stones
of such miniature deaths,
there is always one more life to find.
One more fine grain of sunlight
to feel between index finger and thumb
and examine
under a set of hard squinting eyes.Encore
The curtain falls.
The venue lights go on.
Smoke still coats the stage,
starting its gradual promotion to the ceiling
like a crowded bar at last call.
The final note curls up inside now warm eardrums,
still ringing.
It is a distorted and jarring note
we won’t soon forget.
Still, the last song is meant to make us
happy we even get to hear one more,
even if some of the chords sound sad.
Cause somewhere between all that sound
making a home inside our ears, we realize…
The next show can sound even better.
The next paycheck we get can mean much more than keeping the lights on.
The next song we hear can inspire us to write more of our own.
The next song we write can sound the best.
The next book we read can make us laugh until we cough.
The next love we live can be our happiest.
The next person we meet we may say Good Morning to every day for the rest of time.
The next anything can be the best everything we ever wanted. -
I’ll close out May with a couple more prose poems from the now 12-year-old The Oxytocin Opera. If this book were a music album, this one below would likely be considered a “single,” the title track. It’s also one of the “sexiest” poems I’ve probably ever written, which is a little comical because I purposely wrote it to hopefully sound and feel as “scientific” as possible. This poem also earned me a poetry slam first place prize once upon a time. Enjoy!
Oxytocin Intro
There was a feeling going through my body like writing a purified poetry when I’m only trying to write fast prose, and you said it’s only a chemical in our heads being released and bonding. It seems so much depends on the way our chemicals read our minds. Our heads are so full of them, how might one measure the ones that tie anything together? What touches and tethers souls to nerves, synapses, and senses?
Skin traverses skin and pores say hello, pouring sweat and salt forth for unfamiliar chemicals to meet and melt together onto night fabric. Cotton sheets collect and hold them like memories, like cells on microscope slides, all that’s left behind after bodies arise and stumble out into late morning sunlight. What exactly is left behind? Dead cells and hair, residue and particles that were once parts of you and me. Glasses and bottles on tables, clothes on floors, remnants of the night before. We have left some of who we are behind in this bed, watching them now become a were. But if such things are left behind, what have we now gained? Chemicals and names? Histories, family trees and philosophies on life and language? Smiles, expectations… wishes?
I wish to see your life lived inside strong verbs and nouns.
I wish to hear your voice diagrammed within active voice sentences.
I wish to feel your history spoken from your tongue and pressed into mine.
I have asked my three wishes of the fickle genie found swimming inside that bottle of wine, at the bottom of that bottle of rum. Should we wish to be more than our chemicals decide we shall be? For now, we have lost and gained bodily scientific reactions and we hold the start of the day in unheld hands. The night ahead will be cool and calm. It is enough to let me smile and not just wish for a thousand more wishes.
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*Another oldie taken from The Oxytocin Opera, celebrating 12 years this week. A good one to honor Mother’s Day too. Enjoy and hug the mothers in your life this weekend!*
Blip on a Black and White Screen
So there you are.
Hiding in plain sight.
Peeking out from a computer monitor.
Playing hide-and-seek already.
Flashing your existence in the steady, persistent rhythm of a single blip.
Your first words have no sound.
And my life as I've known it, as the saying goes,
won't be quite the same ever again.
The monitor mirrors the beats of your sheet music.
A perfect metronome for your newly written symphony.
There will be days ahead, I know
Where worry wells up and sticks like fresh paint on the walls of your room.
What color will they be?
What colors will you decide to paint our world?
I know my own walls have become pretty tarnished.
I know some days, when the light hits it just so,
the grey tones look like a Midwest winter sunset
sinking behind the sky's wall of clouds the color of April snow in ditches.
Like the funny way everything natural worth watching in the world
Is harder to look away from when part of it is hidden.
I have never known a lunch break away from the office
to have changed the rules of life
faster than this monitor has by being switched on.
Standing in my wrinkled slacks and uncomfortable
shoes, I never knew I could be
both so small and huge as your only world
trapped in black and white, etched in dots per inch.
One day coming so soon,
We are going to say hello.
And those two syllables will ring on
until my voice has no more sound. -
Today marks the 12th anniversary of the publication of my first poetry collection (a verse drama where every poem equals a chapter in the narrative), The Oxytocin Opera! Lots of memories for this one, including staging a full literary rock opera with a musician friend of mine. To celebrate its May anniversary, I thought I’d share a few poems on this page this month taken from both that collection and/or others from the time period I wrote this (about 2011-2012). Here is one of my personal favorites from that collection. This poem was also subsequently published in a college poetry journal called Dark Matter.
If you like what you read here and are interested in reading the complete verse drama, you can still order it on Amazon by clicking the link below. And if you do choose to get it and you like it, please consider leaving me a review. Thank you so much and enjoy!
Click Here to Buy The Oxytocin Opera!
Sally + Mike
Beneath the balcony, Sally + Mike is spelled out in clumps of dead palm bark and seaweed on pale sands. Its author used these same crude materials to draw a heart above their names. The moon climbs its ladder over the Atlantic. Its light unrolls a royal carpet across the surface composed of diamonds that travels from one worn-edged corner of the earth and leads to this specific section of shoreline below my hotel window. I think I see Coleridge walking on the water, bringing bread, fish and a big dead sacrilegious bird to everyone on shore.
Why have I not seen this before? The way a full moon transfigures the breakers into shadowed horses galloping to their death on the shoreline. The madness of white-capped ghosts and clouds at breakneck speeds left to right across this water color painting drip drying off an Earth-sized page. Waves jot their formulas down on an endless blackboard, followed by their solutions – simply erase the problem. If the stars were our tonight, the beauty might be too much to bear.
Walking along the coastline, the high hotel windows behind me flicker and flutter television nightlights, staving off fear of the dark and of sleeping alone. Me, I’m watching the ocean’s programming schedule tonight cause it’s much funnier than a sitcom and truer than reality TV. The voices in the waves say, “If only you could hear the stories we hold. Your little problems would mean as little to you as they already do to the world and us.”
For now, it is enough to stare into the ocean like a bathroom mirror and say I love you but you can be so much more than this. Realize you’re not important to the world and most in it and you will be everything you’ve ever wanted. “Watch me,” says the sea. “I will teach you why these things are true.”
I watch. An apt student. The world shifts in its seat and begins to slip away from vision as breakers dissolve like a billion Alka Seltzer tablets. Nothing can be more important than this. Than watching everything disappear and come back again, this show on endless syndication.
At dawn, Sally + Mike still waits in the sand, but its creator is nowhere to be found.
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Author Bret Hoveskeland 