He doesn’t think that I’m real smart,
All I do he picks apart
But, surprise!
He thinks I’m wise
If I should give to him my heart.
– Steve Shoemaker, Urbana, IL, June 7, 2015
Poster from Battered Women’s Support Services, Vancouver, Canada
Cleaning toilets
Changing adult diapers
Scraping up roadkill
Killing in a slaughterhouse
Telling family Mom has died
Telling Mom the baby died
Killing unadopted pets
Telling kids their pet has died
Teaching to the test
– Steve Shoemaker, Urbana, IL, June 7, 2015
button against teaching to the test.
She’s small, as they say, for her age.
She’s four-foot-eight though she’s twelve
years watching this whole world revolve
around the red sun.
…………………………….She’s on stage
each day when at school or at home.
Her voice screeches loudly, can fill
her classroom and on down the hall.
She’s always the one in the gym
whose laugh or whose cry will resound
and reverberate as they play.
She screamed when she thought that she saw
a stranger beneath a large mound
of bedclothes in her parents’ room.
She took off one flip-flop and struck
her napping grandfather. The smack
was heard by everyone home.
The parents said she should have run
outside–and then called 9-1-1…
– Steve Shoemaker, Urbana, IL, June 5, 2015
“until Saturday a friend asked me to write a funny tribute to mainstay in a community choir I sang with since I retired. Here is her picture & the light-verse-for-hire. Print it if you want. It’s all I got. (They read it last night at a party–at Ginny’s house–and gave her a framed copy.)”
1.
There’s a Ginny that lives in Mahomet–
Tongue and pen are fast, like a comet,
She sings a fine alto,
Or even soprano,
Bakes pastries, and writes a good sonnet!
2.
She goes to Beyler’s for her singing lessons
And she always pays for her sessions
She teases her Julie,
And if sometimes unruly,
A good Catholic, she makes her Confessions!
3.
Her demeanor is often quite merry,
The hats she wears: extraordinary!
And there’s alway a prank,
With her husband, Frank:
Their parties are all legendary.
4.
We all can agree, not one is a doubter
That Ginny Muhich is never a pouter.
So let’s give a cheer
For our Ginny so dear,
The Chorale would go under without her!
– Steve Shoemaker, Urbana, IL, May 31, 2015
Verse – Soul Food
Flowers in soil
Feed the soul
Soul Food Flowers
– Steve Shoemaker, Urbana, IL May 24, 2015.
There was an old man with weak prostate,
Who overnight could not stay prostrate
For more than two hours
Without golden showers
In porcelain towers. His poor mate
Could never reach REM sleep all night,
And so every morning they’d fight
Till each took a bedroom
With a private bathroom,
And now everything is all right.
– Steve Shoemaker, Urbana, IL, May 14, 2015
Some will come we never knew
Others we knew well have died
Some faces have never changed
Eyes that smile or smiles that kiss
Age has bent and broken some
Motorcycles carry some
Others have three legs or six
Hair is gone or colored now
Eyes see less and ears have hair
Some wear aids and others should
Minds remember hearts recall
Or we cannot think at all
– Steve Shoemaker, Urbana, IL, May 7, 2015
To make grape jelly, she began
three years before by planting vines
along the back fence in her yard.
And now she lets her young grandson
pick purple clumps with his small hands.
With grandma he is never bored,
he helps her cook, and even clean.
She marks the doorway when he stands
to check his growth, just like the plants.
– Steve Shoemaker, Urbana, IL, May 3, 2015.
wanting everyone to know
just how great we really are
or denying to ourselves
and to everybody else
that we have the skills and smarts
that could win 10,000 hearts
treating others as beneath
us or even inhuman
being irresponsible
for myself or for the world
worse is not caring at all
being dead before we fall
finally into our graves
death is god’s last enemy
– Steve Shoemaker, Urbana, IL, May 2, 2015
How do you explain this? Watch and read Steve’s explanation.
Verse – We Serve & Protect
Sadly, some white policemen
serve themselves, their deepest fears,
on the streets American,
by protecting their ideas:
they think they hear their wives say,
I choose a black man today.
(Only this sort of a Freudian analysis, I think, can explain the extreme anger and violence.)
– Steve Shoemaker, Urbana, IL, May 1, 2015
Views from the Edge 