Adamantine Redux September 2020

By Jim Dodds

The lost conceits we all maintain
grow weary as the seasons turn
all the strategies we use collapse,
and mirrors do our pleading spurn.

These adamantine phantoms fade,
all pretense, smoke and mirrors just
like dramas set on Shakespeare's stage,
the ghosts of anger, fear and lust.
Do fame and love and beauty's lies
just glare and glitter and obscure
the silent, soft and timeless real
that lies beneath all glamour's lure?

Jim Dodds moved to Vermont in the late Winter of 1967 and spent the late 60s and early 70s in Plainfield at Goddard College. He went back in 1999 to finish his BA and got used to expressing himself through writing. After losing his wife to Alzheimer’s in 2020 he needed a new start, so he proceeded from using his own poetry as a part of his graphic art to taking a writing course and getting a small piece published on storied-stuff.com. Some of the energy he’s been pouring into his bricollage 1960s inspired posters seems to have attracted the muse of writing to his studio again, and so now a new life begins; short stories, poetry, a 10 minute play, and rewriting a novel he sent around in 2018 for as long as the thickness of his skin held out. “Charlie’s Windex” is an entirely new effort. He hopes you enjoy i