LareDOS[redux] (https://laredosnews.com/author/randy-koch/)
Randy Koch taught at LCC and TAMIU from 1997-2007, earned an MFA at the University of Wyoming in 2009, and then taught for eleven more years at Bloomsburg University of Pennsylvania. He currently lives in southwestern Minnesota and is the author of three collections of poetry—Composing Ourselves, This Splintered Horse, and Against the Risen Flesh—as well as two volumes of family history. He is working on a memoir of his twenties and yet another family history. And he runs, just to be sure he still can.
Why invest in falsehoods rather than truth and in cruelty rather than compassion?
Why willingly deny ourselves and others our individual autonomy? And why ignore the explicit threats of a vain, vengeful autocrat who threatens and degrades, instigates conflict, and appeals to our basest, foulest instincts?
Gone: even fading friendships, the lapse of devotion, the failure of vows, and the mirage of ’til death do us part
Why should I reread a book? To ache. To witness. To wonder. To delight. And to experience again others’ lives in order to enlarge our own. To make not just a living but a life worth living.
Ode to the bronzed sore loser barking lies
to chumps like a carnival clown; never one
to take the high road: may he find his way to the pen
I am a dream lost in the laced light of dawn. I am memory and gratitude, the risk of November, a promise regretted.
“How came we through the swells and troughs to rifle God’s pure grace?”
I’ll likely be back this way; returning, after all, a way to gauge how little or how much I’ve changed
The words “police force” refer less to manpower than to the all-too-common methods of many officers
You will not agree with or like all of it, but at least then you can decide what speaks to you honestly and thoughtfully, or what reeks like a late-night skunk or the cow shit you remember from your youth