WORDS
This is where you will find my unpublished poems and fiction, reviews of works by other authors, and guest posts.
The Sea Gull Blogs – Mendocino A Half Century Ago
Sea Gull Restaurant Stories© 2026 David Herstle Jones The Sea Gull Restaurant was a popular hangout in Mendocino during the 1970s and 80s. Lots of things happened there, good and bad. Think in the Morning has posted memories of several of these happenings in our...
Poems
Think in the Morning Poems Poem by Think in the Morning: A BeePoem by Think in the Morning: Analytic GeometryPoem by Think in the Morning: Basket CasePoem by Think in the Morning: Between the DaysPoem by Think in the Morning: Blake’s SongsPoem by Think in the...
Hugo
This morning I noticed my dragon alebrije, Hugo, named after a friend who worked at Lucy’s Cucu Cabana in Puerto Vallarta for several years. The shop is gone and so is Hugo but the dragon lives in my house as a protector of great memories that might otherwise escape...
Excuse Me For Not Dying
Mistah Kurtz—he dead (Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness) The remark “excuse me for not dying”, which Leonard Cohen attributes to his Zen teacher Kyozan Joshu Sasaki Roshi, is one of those deceptively simple Zen statements that opens up the whole question of life,...
The Force That Through The Green Fuse Drives The Flower
The force that through the green fuse drives the flowerThe force that through the green fuse drives the flowerDrives my green age; that blasts the roots of treesIs my destroyer.And I am dumb to tell the crooked roseMy youth is bent by the same wintry fever.The force...
The Anti-Jazz Of Epic Fury
Referring to the character Horacio Oliveira in Julio Cortizar’s masterpiece novel Hopscotch, one reviewer wrote:He often asks himself how it is possible that humans as a genus, as a species, as an ensemble of civilizations, have arrived at the present day by...
In Like A Lion, Out Like A Lamb
I’m hopelessly stuck in the sixties, seventies and eighties. That’s as far as I go unless I’m forced to function in the present as I am today. I’m pretty good with technology, I guess. I majored in math and economics. God know’s why, as they say, those who believe....
The Anatomy of Saudade
It is a wet, quiet, cold, and somewhat dreary day. My thoughts flex inward like a flock of parakeets with heads tucked under their wings, voices muffled as they speak an instant already gone. Life feels off balance, stuck between a past that can be revisited but...
The Forest
“My house . . .” said Cosimo, and gestured around, at the highest branches, the clouds, “my house is everywhere, everywhere I can climb, going up . . .” The Baron Of The Trees, Italo Calvino In 1958 when I was twelve years old I visited my great uncle Lewis Foster...
Five Different Responses To Clouds
All of us have a place in history. Mine is clouds. Richard Brautigan I remember when I first learned about clouds in grade school. We drew pictures of feathery clouds, flat and gloomy clouds, fat Confucius clouds, and giant, dark, menacing genies ready to pounce....
My Osprey Family
They come every spring, my osprey family. From Central America, Mexico, Baja California, along the Southern California coast back up the Pacific Flyway, to the rivers and estuaries of the Mendocino coast. To this place. To my place. There is an instinct of staying...
An Apple A Day
The tasty apples that gave rise to the phrase “as American as apple pie” aren’t native to North America. The seeds journeyed over from Europe like illegal aliens. The spices, cinnamon, nutmeg and clove, sneaked in from Asia via the European spice trade. After years...