Category Archives: Anthology

My collected writings and those of family members.

The System

Posted on May 28, 2018 by JMN

This is the SYSTEM the FATHERS built. These are the COURTS that rule in the SYSTEM the FATHERS built. These are the JUDGES who bench the COURTS that rule in the SYSTEM the FATHERS built. This is the PREZ who … Continue reading →

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Best Wishes, Rita Dove

Posted on May 27, 2018 by JMN

Well, my mama didn’t raise a bean counter. I have better things to do — like trying to sit down and write a good poem, for example. (Rita Dove) I have high hopes for the sitting- Down part of your enterprise. … Continue reading →

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They Spy With Their Little Eye

Posted on May 25, 2018 by JMN

The exoplanet Kepler-twenty-two-B Has temperatures designed for you and me. (“What is an exoplanet?” you might say. It’s one outside our system, far away.) Pools of liquid water could exist there, So life just might be able to subsist there. … Continue reading →

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Two Testaments

Posted on May 20, 2018 by JMN

THE BOOK OF DON’T Waste not. Want not. Kill not. Lust not. Rage not. Curse not. Gawk not. Binge not. Lie not. Lay not. THE BOOK OF DO Do not. (Copyright 2018 James Mansfield Nichols. All rights reserved.)

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Didactic Doggerel

Posted on May 17, 2018 by JMN

A Truly Jumbo Shrimp It’s said a jumbo shrimp’s an oxymoron. A shrimp’s a little thing you put red sauce on And gobble by the dozen boiled or fried. Some of us could eat more if we tried. Enter the … Continue reading →

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Written in the 70s

Posted on May 17, 2018 by JMN

had declared himself in pursuit of substantives. His gastrointestinal tract had lately begun to feel large and accommodating. (commodious, capacious). Thank the stars and the Creator of the stars. The spasms of sweet cream she had manfully swallowed; all the … Continue reading →

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This Is Stag Country

Posted on May 17, 2018 by JMN

Bee Kay Gooch had Kassidee, Krissee and Kooger quick and early. Kooger’s the baby. Bee Kay and Jason married Labor Day and Kooger came Christmas. Spyder Blunt, her stepdad, had a restraining order on Jason that year, but kid’s find … Continue reading →

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Social Math — UK

Posted on May 16, 2018 by JMN

Every June, The Thane of Thoth, a tavern, helps celebrate Chichesterton’s famous Regatta-on-the-Hogg by dropping the price of its brews by 12.5% for the third of a fortnight that couches the merriment. Question: Speculate as shrewdly as your humble station … Continue reading →

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From Memory

Posted on May 12, 2018 by JMN

“The Second Coming,” poem by W. B. Yeats, http://www.poetryfoundation.org. Yeats, like Shelley in “Ozymandias,” associates folly and tyranny and self-aggrandizement with the desert lands. That happens to be where the trio of stern monotheisms were “revealed”: I’m the Only One, … Continue reading →

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Didactic Doggerel

Posted on May 12, 2018 by JMN

Space-Ball Note: Merkanooka is in Australia. Seguin, a town in Texas, is pronounced “suh-GHEEN.” Turley is in Oklahoma. A space-ball fell from nowhere on Namibia, A place more noted for a fossil tibia. Another one, the Merkanooka ball From Gemini, … Continue reading →

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