August 7-13

My life was forever changed when I was matched with Makiko on March 3, 2013 at Guide Dogs for The Blind’s Oregon Campus. This week, International Assistance Dog Week, highlights how so many dogs across the world are helping their handlers to maintain their health, safety, independence, and freedom.

There are many types of assistance dog. Guide dogs are often the most well known. In recent years, psychiatric service dogs are gaining more awareness. There are many other types of assistance dogs- mobility service dogs, hearing service dogs, medical alert service dogs, autism service dogs, and seizure response dogs.

Many assistance dogs are program trained (from an organization that specifically trains them) but there are also many dogs that are owner trained or trained with a private trainer. It is important to remember that all are covered under the ADA as long as the dog is well trained…

My See-Through Mind is available on Amazon now! Just click the highlighted link and you will be taken through to Amazon and a preview of the new book (which will cost nothing but you can read a sample and leave a review).  I hope you enjoy this unseen work and will let me know what you really think.  Reviews are one of the toughest things to get so please don’t be shy – I need your help – all is much appreciated!  So a monster big thank you everyone – it’s been another long slog to bring you My See-Through Mind but these are labours of love!

Now I’m getting stuck back into god’s daughterso I’m sure a glimpse will end up on my Monster Maker site, but only a little taste – a bitter pill of someone a little scary…or maybe a lot scary… you can decide :)…

I have lain awake listening for the owl’s cry.
A note that chills
Thrills
Then does die.

One day
This bird of prey
Will carry my soul away,
Or so the supersticious say.

Mice hide
While I, in my pride
Decide
The owl’s erie cry
Signifies that I will die.

The bird has no interest in me
So why can I not be free
Of his cry
That to my window nigh
does rise, then, as suddenly, die?

Biography

Kevin Morris was born in Liverpool on 6 January 1969.
After having obtained a BA (hons) in history and politics and a MA in Political theory, from University College Swansea, he moved to London where he now lives and works.
Kevin blogs at newauthoronline.com. For details of his published works please see the “About” page on newauthoronline.com.

I am the girl who wasn’t there.

I did not sit upon that chair,

playing provocatively with my hair.

I did not drink that expensive wine,

While gazing on your paintings fine.

I did not recline under the quilt so red,

Or moan with exstasy in your bed.

If by chance, an earing she should find,

Worry not, it is not mine.

This is not a philosophical question, or a religious one. It’s a question about what happens to the person sitting by a hospital bedside when the occupant of the bed, someone who was loved and cherished, becomes (suddenly or at last) “the deceased,” dies perhaps even while the sun is still shining brightly through the clean hospital windows, mocking the dark ache in the heart of the solitary survivor.

In the hospital where Bill died early in May, a four-year-old state-of-the-art hospital in upscale Princeton, New Jersey — home of a world-renowned university, of the Institute for Advanced Studies (where Albert Einstein found safe harbor after fleeing anti-Semitism in Europe during World War II), and of Westminister Choir College, whose graduates grace stages in many celebrated opera houses – in this spiffy new hospital, the person blinded by tears who holds the still-warm hand of a new cadaver…