I was very gratified that my band was able to pull off a David Bowie cover and further gratified when it made it to our one and only formal album. Here’s the track, “Five Years,” by David Bowie:

. Covered by Bergamot The Band, live at Toad sometime in the early 2000s

Thank you David Bowie!

On the Mat

At the start with fear beside,
flat, fat and taught.
Arms and legs and trunk contract
behind imprisoned thought.

To Gods-
head bowed heart lifted.
In teachable postures.
Let go to be guided.

The world is too much with us.
Yet here the center’s found.
Reclaim the dwindling powers.
To length, breadth and width we’re bound.

Bhandas contracting and arching restraint.
Desperate, subtle swinging.
Drips and drops a yoga of in.
The blood, the light all rushing.

Now on the mat,
puddles of death explored,
entangling the farthest star,
resistance relinquished…restored.

-Jack Paradis
Los Angeles 2014

I was co-editor of the Middlesex Community College newspaper and a founding member of “Voices” literary magazine, clawing my way back up the higher education ladder when I first was introduced to Maya Angelou. I am very grateful for my experiences at MCC. That year Dr. Angelou’s book, I know why the caged bird sings, was the common book selection. Everyone read it and it was incorporated into most of the course ware. I was so attracted to her story and the graceful, poetic style of her prose work. She draws in the reader with generosity and kindness, yet she is so very fierce. Later that year she paid a visit to the Lowell campus of MCC and I was spellbound.

Many years later, my wife and I read her memoirs and visited her old haunts in San Francisco. She really is a righteous, powerful force in the world and we are all better for the time she spent with us.

Mother’s day is coming this weekend. Here is a poem I penned for my lovely mother back in the day when I penned poems:

Finally a Poem for My Mother

Wondering what kind of poem is right for you,
years go by with words for others.
For wedded friends and once-upon-a-time lovers;
for settings and sunsets; great joy, flat sorrow and
marvel at simple things.
Poems for teachers, fathers, even dogs or rain
Or the welcome smell of bread
like a warm cottage in a damp wood
and the new rays of spring light
that wake long tired spirits to rise
up out of drowsy winter.

Poems for all these
through the years have come
but for a mother there are few.

Perhaps it is the fallibility of
poems and words
That could never rightly paint
the astounding presence of spirit
over a loud expanding family of seeming innocents
who are each wise, when cornered,
rife with talent and the strange gift of empathy;
who are open with each other and in love
with the possibilities of the world.

Because at the core – beneath
the light cynicism of day to day –
they have hope and they have faith.

Perhaps no poems come
because you will them away
with merciless, indomitable Irish modesty,
or whatever it is that lets you dance around  in a tutu
lilting slightly flat tunes
in front of principals, superintendents and
god knows who else
one moment
But be as private and reserved as the reverend mother
the next

Perhaps no poem can find you
because you are on the internet
or at “Decells” shopping for some one else
or rebuilding a church
or at some grandchild’s soccer game, concert recital,
graduation day, birthday party, stage performance,
arts & crafts fair, etc.
or feeding someone
or buying food to one day possibly feed to someone
or listening to someone’s point of view
or challenging someone’s point of view
or patiently helping the ones you love
get where they need to that day

I guess the right poem for you is none.
You claim to never understand them anyways
and it’s doubtful that justice could ever be done
through a verse about daisies and April rain
So I’ll just say what a marvelous 70 years!
Through God’s grace we’ve been blessed having you here
and just so you don’t think I’m wasting your time
To make it seem like a poem I’ll end with a rhyme.