Shout Out

This shout is out

To the patient

The compromisers

The persevering

Facers of odds

The uncomplaining

Good-soldier type

Tomorrow I might

Holla at you others

Don't pitch a fit

Today it's props

To my suck-it-up homies

Free-verse Sonnet: Hero Story

Like the stranger

I feel no loss

Nor real gain

I find I'm here

That's all

Does that ring a bell?

I watch the papers

What's left of them

And it should be said

The news trickles 

How're you?

Is everything well?

I'm no hero in any story

But I'm working on yours

Where He's Been

Do you ever see people
And wonder where they've been
What they've seen?
I assigned myself a case

We'll come back to where he's been
But for now let's think of him here
Without others who could join him
Who have loved him
Have taught him
Buoyed him up somehow
He'd be surrounded by blackberries
Waving curtains
Nasal speaking voices
The smell of pine sol

But this is he on he
Unless, of course
She wanted to suddenly appear
No longer afraid of being her mother
Or losing her father
Or whatever that was

No, he's here at the beach
Looking at the ocean
And people he doesn't know
Passing without a glance
As if they fathom
He is to be left alone
That he has been in exile

I know, I should have
Introduced myself

Awesome God

Most of the people I know
Serve an awesome God:
Mindless entertainment

Oh Raymond Carver

Oh Raymond Carver

You and your divorces

And recovering alcoholics

Always calling the sheriff

Someone dying in a car

A car that keeps going

Through a building

Taking a few months

To see if things can be worked out

Horses heads in the fog outside

Children caught in the middle

Oh Raymond Carver

Hamer on the Web

Lloyd Hamer on the Web

Up at the crack of dawn and down to the office to surf

the internet for hours without end.  

Jesus may come today, says one

particularly memorable page.

He will come back for us

and take us to his big home page in the sky

at http://www.heaven.com.

The page offers a bit of insight

into Jesus' thoughts as he hung between two thieves.

The dramatic scene is animated right before your eyes

as the Lord and Savior writhes in pain

and has his now historic conversation

with the thief on the right.

"This day thou shalt be with me in Paradise",

says Jesus in his best Marlon Brando voice.

It was the twenty first century,

Beginning badly as it did

Lloyd Hamer was born after bitnet became

The internet in the eighties

technology was on the throne,

Jesus worked now only behind the scenes

Lloyd’s little northern family was just hoping

to be able to keep up with it all,

no delusions that it was going to perfect their lives

or replace their faith in the New Testament.

Lloyd Hamer was so named

because his parents had an ironic sense of things

and they liked the way it rhymed

with the country pianist’s name, Floyd Cramer.

They had no way of knowing their son

would become a famous pianist himself

and that he would travel the world,

playing before auditoriums filled with loyal fans,

who yelled for more when he was done.

His style a blend of Joplin (Scott),

John (Elton), and Lewis (Jerry Lee).

Sometimes the music would get so tasty

he would begin to sing lyrics made up a few days before,

and the audience would turn delirious.

The music was rapturously pastoral and American.

Reminiscent of riding across the heartland

on a trainful of boozers and gamblers

who alternated between celebrating

the birth of the savior and mourning the death of a president,

That would be as close as you might come

to the level of emotion without actually being there.

If you walked in during the middle of a set,

you might not understand immediately

the raucous reaction of the audience,

but once you had been there a few minutes,

your synapses, dendrites, axons, and so on

would begin to groove to the melodies and

there was no siren on earth that could draw you away.

Lloyd’s concerts were sent in streaming

Video to local computers…

Lloyd was not a tall man, in fact

he was only 5 feet 8 in his street shoes,

but he could make a grand piano live up to its name,

with his own compositions, or sometimes

renditions of the works of others.

Meanwhile back home in Duluth, Minnesota,

George and Ethel Hamer would wait in the snow

for another recording he had released and

his visits which came less frequently

as the years went by.

Emails, clips and video calls

They did not know it, but they were destined

to live well into the twenty first century

and they were going to see some things

that the loving parents of a musical genius

should never be forced to go through.

The country they loved and the one he traveled

were worlds apart.

In the world they had known,

you should be sincere and not sarcastic,

successful and not stressed out,

and if worldly, not folorn.

But back then they had not had their MTV.

Lloyd's first video included a couple patterned after them,

almost to the point of the old lady and man

in front of the barn with the pitch fork,

but not quite.

Most of it was shot in Georgia,

a state where they had never been,

and had no desire to be.

The state where Roosevelt had died

and a few other things had happened,

like Jimmy Carter.

They lived vicariously and electronically through Lloyd,

although as he began to stay away,

call less often and write almost never,

they talked about the weather,

about the Twins, the Timberwolves and the Vikings.

You should sit down for a few minutes

with them sometimes

and say the name Lloyd

and watch their faces light up.

“Lloyd lives in a different world”

They like to say