Do You Like?

A few fine words
​(at least, only a few words!)

THEORY
I am going to try a showcase of poems to replace the "Duel". There will be one of mine here since I can find them easily and can rapidly copy them from one place to another. There will also be one featuring some other contemporary poet whose work I like, appropriately credited.
PROCESS 
I will change the poems frequently but not necessarily on a fixed schedule and encourage everyone to comment and to promote the readings on Twitter and other social media. I will also leave the rating widget so please show your applause (or disapproval).
PARTICIPATION
As with the Duel if you would like one of your poems featured, please reach out to me. I love to promote others' good works!
FINALLY
At the bottom will be a piece of flash fiction, sometimes mine, sometimes not.

As I Like It #29

Burn
 
Emotion sizzles the circuits
Tiny impulses between neurons
Somehow have more power
Carving a channel, bringing
Exhaustion to the entire body.
Undiminished computing power
Now split, distracted, solving
The assigned task but struggling
With the unsolvable politics.
Brilliance, performance, never
Enough for the sucking wound
Of the irrational, short-sighted
Pettiness, denial, and cowardice.
So it is; so it has been.
Funny how the emotion
After oh so many years,
Is still strong enough
To make the neurons burn.
I Remember
​
Bits and pieces remembered
The froth of a life tossed nonchalantly
Into the air as the great waves
Churn inexorably toward the shore.
Still photos, dragged from thick albums
Catalogued in an arcane neural index
Only to match snippets of video
With painstaking cross-indexing.
The richness of a life, but a minute
Recovered when there were hours
Still strikingly valuable, amazingly
Satisfying, full of myriad emotions.
We build a story with these fragments
And tell it to ourselves, hoping
To build more chapters, to revise,
And share with loved ones and strangers.
In the end the slivers of life that made
The story incorporate into the tales
Of each life touched by mine and live on
Like ripples in a still pond of memory. 

Flash Fiction

Age comes to us all, she said, in a voice barely above the sound of the dry leaves cast about by the fall winds. With it, the burden and joy of memory. Both increase, she said, with the increase in years, direct proportion, as the mathematician would say. Bask in the joy and use well the burden, for when the years stop, so will they both.
​
​Unpublished, by Greg Schroeder 

Take a look at my published works​​ and projects


Please browse around, follow the links, take in some of the samples scattered around the site. Do drop me an email. Come by the blog, post a comment, so long as you follow (at least as closely as I do) the dictums of polite discourse.
Classic Literature
(The Little Mermaid statue in Copenhagen)
or, my Published Works
See! Cats can read!
But can they write? Anyway some of what I'm working on.
Projects.
Me (a bit younger than I am now)! contact me with comments, suggestions, helpful hints...