TinkerX

Cold, Stiff

Walk with me again
like we walked home from school when
sticky, yellow buses couldn’t wait
for drama and debates.

Snow-congested, gravid Boston skies
harrowed moisture from the corners of our eyes.
Trees shamed bare of gaudy, orange leaves
stood naked, proud of winter’s clarity.

Breath comes quick. Too cold to talk.
Legs pumped, rubber boots cracked ice, we walked
and steam rolled from your mouth like smoke.
I watched you bend your neck, your shoulders bowed

as wind rode your arching back, your hair a tumbled, yellow cloud,
the only light in a fading day
of dirty white and depthless, concrete grey.
Movements slower, harder as we near home.

Stiffening as cold seeps into bone.
Nearly numb just before entry.
Eyes closed, fingers dead, you fumbled for my key.

Brittle

You can spank a bad boy with a finger-thick willow switch,
cut fresh, dripping green and running full of summer sap.
Or you can curl it back, head to tail upon itself, end on end.
Go even further, make it bend into the Christian fish;
an alpha. Then let it snap! The tension gone, it rises, spinning,
falling, finally. Lost in high grass by the swimming hole.

That branch’s brother cut in winter’s short, sharp noon won’t yield
up one degree of give. The juice that lives in sun and rain is gone,
sucked down to ground. It sleeps in rocks. The willow only knows
of it in dreams of caravanserai, eastern gifts and tales of kings.

“Softly,” is the wise-word of the willow on his darkening wind,
his long-night solstice wind that shakes the lights and brittle bulbs
hung on the changeless, undead pines.
The willow sleeps and waits for limber times.

Snow Angel

Fallen, fallen in the snow.
You can point, but she is gone.

We name the hole the thing. The wet recess
where she once lay. It’s long hatched
its angel, though.

Wind and flakes have now erased her footprints there
and back. Two wings. Two legs. A head.
A halo where
she shook her snowsuit hood.

The hole is not what’s real.

The angel is revealed, released and dances now
with cocoa and a powdered doughnut. How
the white fluff coats her fingers,
coats her cheeks.

Winter wind seeks cracks, lifts twists of sugar
and of snow, dusts eyelashes of angels
as we watch them fall
and watch them dance
and watch them go
to sleep.

All written in the space of about a week. Who knows why this happens? Perhaps John Hodgman.

Click to read. Or just enjoy the titles.

• Always Boy
• He dances with ghosts
• one day
• Wait, wait

After a couple year hiatus from writing in the legal marketing field, I’m back contributing to a publication I feel really good about. It’s called “Originate,” and the editors have already snagged some of the best legal marketing writers in the biz. Yes, yes. And me. Daryl Cross, Mark Beese and Adam Stock join Larry Bodine, Barry Schneider and me for monthly advice, tips, tools and deep wisdom about how to generate business for sole practitioners and small firms.This is not puff stuff. This is all highly usable, measurable, practical information from folks who have been in legal marketing for years, and who have helped firms generate hundreds of thousands of dollars in new revenue.My first set of articles (I’m on my fourth month at this point) focuses on setting up a specific, reliable sales pipeline. The idea being that you don’t get people to go from never having heard of you to being a dedicated client in one step. Same as you don’t go from “stranger” to “spouse” without some various activities in-between.I outline a reasonable sales pipeline in 12 steps. Yeah, I know. Sounds like a recovery program. Well… It is! It’s a way to recover from relying on luck and your golf game to get new business. Lawyers become addicted to *doing* the work, and forget to take the time necessary to *get* new work. This pipeline plan makes it easy to define a number of specific, discreet steps that will move potential clients ever closer to being die-hard customers and fans.Friends and readers of mine get a nice little $50 break when they sign up. So, if you know any attorneys who want to start working on their rainmaking game… send ‘em over here.

Good new word from Word Spy: co-rumination. n. The extensive and repeated discussion, particularly among friends, of problems and negative feelings. Also: corumination.

This amuses me even more, considering the roots of the word “rumination.”

Abe Books has posted a neat article about stuff that used booksellers have found in books. Money, baseball cards, airline tickets and lots of personal notes.

Would make a cool scene for a story or novel, or a neat moment in a poem.

I used to really like the Encyclopedia Britannica. By “used to,” I mean of course, “before Wikipedia.” It’s a fine reference work, and I never had anything against it until they, and others, started getting smarmissimus about how Wikipedia sucks because it’s written by people who aren’t on the staff of an encyclopedia. And how kids shouldn’t be citing it as a resource. Etc. etc.

Now… I don’t want to get into a fight about Wikipedia. I don’t care if you like it or not or have issues with it. This is not an opinion piece. The fact of the matter is, Wikipedia gets waaaay more hits than Britannica. Maybe it’s because Wikipedia is free. Maybe it’s because it has lots more articles. Maybe it’s because people like to think that anybody (themselves included) is smart enough to help somebody else out with a reference question.

Maybe it’s all about elves and pixies. Repeat: I don’t care. From a marketing and sales perspective, yelping about how your customers are dumb because they choose a competitor is, well… dumb.  Britannica could hop about, get red in the face, and produce volumes of statistics about how it’s better. If users don’t have a compelling reason to go there, they’ll go somewhere else.

What Britannica *should* have been doing is figuring out a way to get more people into their space. Which they now have, with a very clever little program called Britannica WebShare. Basically, if you write a blog or publish on the Web in any way, you can apply for a free year of access to the entire online version of the Encyclopedia Britannica, and link to the full articles there.

That’s clever. Very clever. My readers now have an ancillary benefit from my blogging relationship with EB. If you’re a regular ol’ person with no subscription to EB (it costs $70/year normally), and you look up “Wikipedia,” you get this:

Wikipedia:  free, Internet-based encyclopaedia operating under an open-source management style. It is overseen by the nonprofit Wikimedia Foundation. Wikipedia uses a collaborative software known as wiki that facilitates the creation and development of articles. The English-language version of Wikipedia began in 2001. It had more than one million articles by March 2006 and more…

Wikipedia… (75 of 754 words)

But if you go to that same article from a link on my blog, even if you don’t have a subscription, you can see the whole thing.

Yep. All 754 words. You’re welcome.

Very, very smart. They have turned chunks of their content into advertising for the whole, and enlisted the help of people who build the Web to engage in that advertising. They get links and good marketing, I (and my readers) get full text articles.

This is a good thing to think about in a general way — how can other content owners release some subset of what they create/own in ways that promote an economic model that makes sense for them?

PS: If you’re interested in the full text of any particular Britannica article, let me know and I’ll work it into a blog post