Two Ghosts
A few years back, the house we used to live in was haunted. It was a good place, though. We were happy there. And although we’ve moved on, I have to admit that sometimes I still miss the ghosts who were there — at least, one of them.
An audio recording of “Two Ghosts” is featured in Episode One of The Gospel of Thomas podcast.
Baba Yaga
You know who she is, even if you don’t recognize the name. She lives deep in the forest, in a little house which is sometimes made out of gingerbread. Sometimes the house runs around on chicken legs. She has iron teeth and she’s always hungry.
This is a fun one to read out loud, especially to small children.
The Marriage License
Life is full of tests. We get tested all the time. But they don’t make you take tests for the obvious stuff, the really hard stuff that it’s too easy to get wrong.
I failed my driver’s test the first time I took it. I can still remember the shame of it, raging at myself in the parking lot of the DMV, knowing that I had to go back to school the next day and admit that I didn’t get my license.
Even after we think we’ve passed, even when we’ve got the license in our hand… we sometimes still fail.
The Face Game
I like to think of this poem like a mild virus — it lingers there in your system, changing how you look at people. Sometimes, years after you think it’s finally faded, you might experience a relapse.
My mother really does play this game.
Knots
They say that fairy tales — the kinds of things that Jakob and Willem Grimm collected — began as warnings for children, letting them know about the dangers of the unknown world.
As a boy, I remember hearing the story of the wife’s ribbon. I had a vague feeling that there was more to the story than what I’d been told.
When I got older, I found that my instincts were correct.
Khepri
I used to belong to a writer’s group. We got together once a week to read each other’s work, collaborate, play with writing exercises and games, and give each other encouragement, inspiration, and assignments.
I wrote a lot of good poems during that time, mainly in response to an assignment from one of the other writers. A typical assignment involved a challenge: Write something on a particular topic, write something using these three words…
This came, as I recall, out of a word challenge and the three words were probably “beetle, ash, and peace.”
If you would like to know more about T.M. Camp’s work, feel free to contact him directly. He’s really quite nice.