NAM/NAAM Day 27: Turkey, Unthankfulness, and Poetry

Here it is Thanksgiving evening, 2025. To teach my diet to mind its own business, I ate too much on purpose. We had a nice spread, and I had seconds when I didn’t need them.

(I digress here. You can skip this part if you like:

I planned to get some of my poems sent to journals, but didn’t. There are still a few days left before deadlines.

I ended up watching wonderfully Gothic tales of perversity, decadence, murder, and ghosts, with episodes of the long-forgotten Supernatural (1979) found on the Mysterious Domain Movie Palace on YouTube. I was around when these were broadcast, and I do not remember late-night TV erotica being a thing, but it was in plain sight if you had the eyes to see it. This is Gothic like Gothic should be done, not like today’s made-for-TV dreck.

The Haunting of Rosalind, taken from a short story by Henry James was directed by Lela Swift, director of scads of Dark Shadows episodes, gives off strong DS vibes, minus Barnabas. Some people complain that it moves slow, but hey, they’ve never read Henry James who didn’t write a sentence shorter than 67 words. (Weirdly, the Mysterious Doman page is so mysterious there is no link to this one on my computer, but there is on my TV!.) Viktoria features a young Judy Cornwell (Daisy on Keeping Up Appearances,) and the great British playwright and screenwriter John Osborne, (Look Back in Anger, The Entertainer, Luther, Tom Jones) takes a turn as Kathleen Nesbitt’s son in Lady Sybil.

Back on the subject:

Finally, I re-worked my Day 23, Brief Thoughts on Adoptee Displacement, into a poem, which I will send out next week to an online publication I am pretty sure will publish it right away. I need to fix a word that just doesn’t get it yet. So, I’ve now written 6 adoption poems, something I swore I would never do. If this one is published, I’ll post the link. You can read Pruning the Family Tree on Tangled Locks.

Before stuffing myself ,my demonic muse dropped by to help me finish a piece I started last night. It made a return call after I stuffed myself giving me some politically incorrect lines about being unthankful on Thanksgiving, Lacking imagination I call it Thanksgiving 2025. It needs some work, but I threw some adoption lines into it posted below. Due to the majority of journals’ rules that anything published- previously–even in a private blog or on a social media page– is ineligible for consideration, I am smart-ass enough to believe that all of my stuff is as publishable as Shakespeare, Oscar Wilde, Hart Crane, and Sylvia Plath combined so, I don’t post poetry. But here are a few lines, which I think is OK to do:

I refuse to be a hypocrite

to assuage a national aesthetic

to fit in.,,

…We take the children of others

Rename them as our own

to feel whole.

We make others less.

However you celebrated today or didn’t, I hope it was a good day.

Caveat:

I am not totally unthankful. I am thankful for Bastard Nation and Nationals and friends and our victories; the friendships I’ve had over the last 30 year via adoption and other disreputable activities– for good an evil, my years with Моя большая любовь, and finally that Donald Trump is getting cooked like today’s turkey. Or is that a lobster in a slow-cook pot?

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