Poor old poem prelude to tomorrow's shoot

Tomorrow's hometown photoshoot out is about weather.  As I was doing it, I remembered that I once wrote a poem about weather.  It was difficult to find because I had filed it away in a folder I call "Poem Graveyard" for poems that I didn't really like but can't bare to delete.  But it is about weather.  So I'll post it for the heck of it.


TV Weather Map


With one hand on the umbrella,
I watch the Doppler greens form patches
where the peaks of my western range
reach up toward your wispy clouds,
moist, your deeper greens flowing,
enlarging across the welcoming Midwest plains,
while irritable yellow spots spin out your warnings,
growing until you collide with this low country heat
fast and thoughtless orange waves,
pouring out electric reds, daring me
to show my face to stinging hail and flashing bolts,
locking me inside this shuttered house
with only the innocent weatherman
grinning on the flickering screen,
until I am no longer brave enough
to go where my coast would
try to understand the deeper sea.

Butler and Bagman debate Santa Clause

So I've got a half hour, maybe forty five minutes, to check in on the boys before rushing off to work this morning.  I pop my head in the door -- an odd image if you really think about it -- and see them pouring over my photographs.  

BAGMAN (without bothering to look up) "Decided to grace us with your presence?"

BUTLER (smiling) "What was that sickening popping sound you made just before you came in?"  

BAGMAN: "Just ignore him.  He's been too busy painting walls and other domestic crap in the real world out there, leaving us to do the work on Friday's shoot.  What was the topic again?"

BUTLER: "It's part of the Christmas theme series.  Weather."

BAGMAN: "WEATHER!!  Since when is that a Christmas theme?!!  On the first day of Christmas, my true love gave to me, a Brookstone A-ne-mom-e-ter.."

BUTLER:  "Weather is critical to Christmas.  Santa Clause needs to know absolutely all the upper-air wind currents around the world, the exact degree and location of thunderstorms...everything.  He has the most advanced weather station in the world.  Just think what would happen if he miscalculated and hit a head-wind coming across the Atlantic.  Millions of kids would be disappointed and he'd be exhausted trying to deliver presents during the Day After Christmas Sales, sneaking around in broad daylight!

BAGMAN (a dumbfounded look on his face):  "You mean you believe in Santa too?"

BUTLER:  "Of course not!  But I enjoy the analysis of probabilities if he actually did exist.  (pause)  What do you mean 'too'?  Don't tell me the wild and wooly Bagman actually believes in Santa Clause!"

BAGMAN: "Of course I do!  He's bearded like me.  He's fat so he must love eating!  He only works one day a year.  And he's always surrounded by Victoria's Secret fashion models."

BUTLER:  "Elves, you idiot!"

BAGMAN: "You mean to tell me you believe in elves?"

BUTLER: "Well...no.  Of course not. But..."

BAGMAN: "Do you believe in Victoria's Sectret fashion models?"

BUTLER: "Well..."

BAGMAN: "My point exactly.  Santa's my hero.  Better than Hugh Hefner because he never ages."

BUTLER (shaking his head in disgust and also because he can't think of a rejoiner)  "Okay, let's get back to work.  Mark doesn't seem to have many pictures of weather so we have to work hard."

BAGMAN:  "What's weather anyhow?  How to you take a picture of weather?  Come to think of it, I'm not sure I actually believe in weather."

At this point, realizing that, once again, Blogspot has made me late for work, I race out the door to face the real world, wondering, oddly, whether I believe in the real world.