Words by Warren

quickly now. hope you all had a great holiday weekend. it was quite an eventful one. so many things happened at the same time, if you think about it. There was Lincoln’s/Washington’s birthdays aka Presidents Day, the start of the Winter Olympics (RIP Nodar Kumaritashvili), the NBA All-Star Game (that screen in Cowboy Stadium is gargantuan), Valentine’s Day, and Lunar New Year. I’m sure somebody somewhere had a birthday over the weekend. Sorry that attention was detracted from you. Go holiday alignment (like planets)!

I’ll never forget my first encounter with your work, reading Franny and Zooey in college, wondering why I had waited so long to find it. My subsequent fascination with the Glass family. My love for Holden goes without saying. And little sister Phoebe who was the only one who understood him.

You’ll always be a legend. No matter how much you didn’t want to be.

Perhaps now you’ll let us see more where that came from.

update: This upgraded wordpress app lets me login into my site through admin, something that was missing before. The app is easy to use after you figure it out. Next step, video.

They finally upgraded so that I can post via iPhone! Woot.

Excuse me for not updating. I’ve been very, very busy.

But I was skimming through A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers, one of my favorite works, and I wanted to share this poignant piece.

Death, like so many great movies, is sad.
The young fancy themselves immune to death. And why shouldn’t they? At times life can seem endless, filled with belly laughs and butterflies, passion and joy, and good, cold beer.
Of course, with age comes the solemn understanding that forever is but a word. Seasons change, love withers, the good die young. These are hard truths, painful truths–inescapable but, we are told, necessary. Winter begets spring, night ushers in the dawn, and loss sows the seeds of renewal. It is, of course, easy to say these things, just as it is easy to, say, watch a lot of television.
But, easy or not, we rely on such sentiment. To do otherwise would be to jump without hope into a black and endless abyss, falling through an all-enveloping void for all eternity. Really, what’s to gain from saying that the night only grows darker and that hope lies crushed under the jackboots of the wicked? What answers do we have when we arrive at the irreducible realization that there is no salvation in life, that sooner or later, despite our best hopes and most ardent dreams, no matter how good our deeds and truest virtues, no matter how much we work toward our varied ideals of immortality, inevitably the seas will boil, evil will run roughshod over the earth, and the planet will be left a playground in ruins, fit only for cockroaches and vermin.
There is a saying favored by clergymen and aging ballplayers: Pray for rain. But why pray for rain when it’s raining hot, poisoned blood?

Here at warrentong.com, we spend countless hours working on layout and development issues. Rest assured, we will be flashier and sleeker than ever. Not that that’s difficult considering.
But seriously, changes to come.

The last day of Poetry Month and our prompt was to write a farewell poem. Hope you enjoy this one.

Lost

She wasn’t found
until days after her death.
The foul stench
was how we knew.
In life, she lived alone,
a good neighbor, never too loud.
She used to tell me stories
about her job as a counselor.
I hope she found her salvation
but I doubt it.
Maybe I’ll find out one day.

All the poems I wrote this month are available in my poems section. No prompts though.

in National Poetry Month, I wonder how many people have touched any poems at all. If you take a look at my poems section, I’ve been actively writing a poem a day!

Of course you can also enjoy a good poem! Here’s one of my recent favorites by a great poet, who happens to be from the UK and is female. Not that she’s only good as a female UKer, which is why I emphasized that she is a great poet first. Anyway, you get the point. Enjoy this poem by Selena Hill.

THE WORLD’S ENTIRE WASP POPULATION

This feeling I can’t get rid of,
this feeling that someone’s been reading
my secret diary
that I kept in our bedroom
because I thought nobody else but us
would want to go in there,
except it’s not my diary,
it’s my husband,
I’d like you to smear this feeling
all over and into her naked body like jam
and invite the world’s entire wasp population,
the sick, the halt, the fuzzy,
to enjoy her.

By Selena Hill

I’m really gungho about National Poetry Month. There are so many more sites doing poetry challenges and readings every day this month.

My favorite magazine, Poets & Writers, is having a challenge too!

http://www.pw.org/content/poetry_challenge

So layout issues aside (I’m working on it, I swear), tomorrow is going to be the first day of National Poetry Month [NPM]. I figure I’d mention it today since tomorrow is also April Fool’s, which might lead some of you to think I’m joking. But I assure you that I don’t kid about poetry! Well, okay, I do, but never NPM!

There are several ways you can enjoy it. One, I suggest you look around to see what events are happening in your city during April. There are probably lots of cool poetry readings you can attend! And you could also read your own writing if you like!

If not, then you could also just read poetry. Sign up for Knopf’s (imprint of Random House) Poem-A-Day newsletter, which only happens in Aprils! This year it’s dedicated in honor of the late John Updike.
check it out here: http://poem-a-day.knopfdoubleday.com/

You could also read the poem of the day from Poetry Daily,
another cool poetry site: http://poems.com/

If you’re really bold and want to test your wit, then you could take part in Writer’s Digest’s April Poem-A-Day Challenge! Each day, we’re given a prompt and construct a poem from said prompt. If you write one participate every day, you get a neato badge to put up on your blog or website haha. Not that that’s the best incentive, but hey, every poem gets considered for publication!
http://blog.writersdigest.com/poeticasides/

And if you’re ultimately lazy, then you could just read whatever I write here. Or something. Anything!

Be well, cyberspace!

ps. check my poems section all this month!

welcome to the new site! here you’ll find updates and the writings of my life. or just regular writings.