is what Jeanie told me to use for a prompt. It could have been
don’t eat the glass I embedded in the poem. Or poems made out
of glass should never throw stones. The problem is my ears. Well,
my hearing—my ears are fine as they are on the outside. But I
digress. Where was I? Oh yes. My hearing is bad. No, my hearing
is for scheiße. And I often spout malapropisms because of what I
think I hear (which is often [almost always]) not what has been
said. Words swim in and out of my ears; their pronunciations
changing with the tide—the pull of the moon. Malapropisms is
not the right word. Malahearisms maybe? Malapropism sounds
like an amoeba or other tiny life form we almost never think about
unless it’s making us sick. But, wait. Poems. Glass. What was that
about? Don’t let the poem hit you in the glass on the way out the
door? It seems like a lifetime ago: that I heard, that the glass of my
hearing was more than half full, that a poem came paddling its
solo canoe over the smooth or wave-lashed water, docking on my
shore, saying, “here I am.”

The glass, by the way, doesn’t give a toot whether it is half full (of
wine, or of water), all the way full or some quantum in between.
The glass is just being glass.

These days Steve Tomasko dreams of being a retired old guy in a boat, fishing by himself (or, that’s what his wife Jeanie said she once pictured him doing). Instead, he occasionally scribbles words when not panicked about the coming A.I. apocalypse.