Marty writes poetry in all of his copious spare time. Here are some of his
pickles inspired by juggling: (Dan wants no affiliation with this page.  ;)



2/3/97 
Things leave his hands 
--tiny planets--
scatter in air, 
fall and rise again.
These things live in his flowing aura.
They are not in defiance 
of gravity, or 
rebellion from physics;
they are simply 
following along his arms,
falling into his form.



9/23/98
Today I stood 10 feet tall...
well, 9 and a half at least. 
I balanced on three and a half foot stilts.
One and a half by
one and a half inch wood squares.
Sixty-three square inches beneath me.
Thirty-one and one-half square inches
beneath each leg,
fastened by a strip of torn bed sheet
tied in double knots around my ankles.

At first, my heart beat fast and I fell.
Then I knew how far the ground was.
I couldn't feel the wound on my knee
(it stung in the shower later)
and I crawled to a tree,
pulling myself up by my hands.
I remember thinking that I could never be paraplegic.
When I calmed the pit of my stomach
I walked OK.
Each step was precarious,
each waddle a balancing act.



2/7/99 
Juggling is poetry. 
I have become a study
of that fair flight of words upon the air
sprung from hands or lips.
Ideas must, in their moments kept aloft, 
take the place of idea
followed by idea, followed by idea.



12/7/98  _feeling the dime dive in the dark_
		or, _coin rolls with a tiny coin and not enough light_
a pushover for silver
float a flying needle
chrome cums in the air
this now, spin
tiny gleaming globe
fresh world--a compass mirror
you shimmer naked
ovular,
opal.



11/5/98  _tyrade of tire_
Tyranny is repetition.
Repetition with variation is poetry,
	is juggling.
My life is tired.

I sink past epochs of repetition,
mind numbs in an ambling 
	machine-gun flight.
Worlds of minutes of hours
fill with motions,
	with the sinking of mind to repetition.



4/6/98
Daytime no longer drizzles.
Afternoon is a savage sunspot.
Kids on thousand dollar bikes
straddle around us, watching.
We're in our front yard,
throwing clubs around. To us this is so natural.
We insist that anyone can learn,
it's not that hard,
all it takes is practice,
(our stock replies)
all it took us was three and a half years.
We sweat and the faces around us
slide off into their own lives;
our bubble of juggling zero thought
bursts with sunset.
Three and a half years
and a day.



					-- All poems © Martin Grider