The Provo Museum of Postal Art

  So i started out as a clown/panhandler back in 2012 in Washington DC, when i got laid off. I’d spent 20 years as a circus clown, then worked in an office. Then got laid off. So out of desperation i put on my clown makeup and outfit and scripted a crude sign on poster paper that read: UNEMPLOYED CIRCUS CLOWN. PLEASE PUT ME IN THE WHITE HOUSE WHERE I BELONG! (Photos Welcome.) I made about sixty bucks a day. Only hassled by the Capitol Hill cops once. Tourists disgorged from their tour buses to snap my photo by the hundreds. Fast forward to 2023. Living in Provo Utah. i’d been writing limericks and haiku and posting it on social media, where it caught the eye of a local TV news reporter. He did a piece on my work. Then my wife Amy got the idea I should advertise out on the street. So i did. Got a few assignments. Then AI took over the writing of poetry. (And if you don’t believe me, well . . . time will tell.) So i decided to write an original poem every day, put it on a white board...

  so i'm out with my whiteboard haiku this morning in front of Hruska's kolaches on center street in provo. there's a good long line waiting to get into the squat little bakery for a bacon, egg, and cheese bun. my poem today reads:   "i want to breathe --  so i can laugh -- and so i can cry."   nothing in the poem to suggest i'm suffering some kind of spiritual crisis, or indicate that -- in the middle of provo, utah, and clean-shaven and sober and not reeking of tobacco -- I am not a Church member. yet out of the blue a young man comes up to me offering a blue back copy of The Book of Mormon. He asks hopefully: "Would you like to have a copy of this?" since there is a five dollar bill clearly stuck in it, i take it and thank him politely. on the flyleaf is inscribed:   "This Book has helped me when I was down. It gave me peace, hope when nothing else would.  I know Jesus lives and loves you.                ...