Agony Aunt -ism

Earworms

Earworms

A meaningless collection of notes
swarms into my empty head
swimming round and round
like clustering tadpoles.

The ebb and flow of that mysterious
music clumps on and on, tight in
 my mind and will not let me go.

Earwigs, some call them,
those senseless repetitions,
day after day, night after night,
awake and asleep,
old tv adverts, short clips
of classical music or popular songs.

They are wheelbarrow songs,
hedge clippings, dead flowers,
crass grass, broken branches, weeds,
repetitive memes of meaning,
a syndrome of stuck songs destined
for the garbage dump and ritual burning
in the hell of an eternal turntable turning.

Comment:

Word magic from the Mikado – “My object all sublime I shall achieve in time, to make the punishment fit the crime” … And in this case I would tie the criminals who invented these ‘ballads, songs, and snatches’ to the stake, with earphones that endlessly repeated all the nonsense we hear day and night, so much of which sticks in the turntables of our brains turning round and round as we toss and turn in our beds at night. Just a case, I suppose, of hearing music while there’s no one there.

And how many earworms did you pluck out of that first paragraph? I can count six, maybe seven. Then, my mind may be very different from yours. Perhaps your mind isn’t in the outrageous Wilfred that mine is. Don’t get that joke, do you? And why should you? I guess you don’t remember Ray’s a Laugh, Round the Horne, Mr. Dimwitty, or Wilfred Pickles – and why should you.

Passent les jours et passent les semaines / ni temps passés ni les amours reviennent / sous le Pont Mirabeau coule la Seine – click on the link for the English version (my translation) and click on this link for a slightly improved revised version.

Yes, as Apollinaire says time flows on and by – or, after Heraclitus – you can never step in the same river twice. More important, perhaps, for those who worry about their past thoughts, words, and deeds – you can throw the stone into the pond, but you can’t control the ripples.

Striations

Striations

Striations

There are striations in my heart,
so deep, a lizard could lie there,
unseen, and wait for tomorrow’s sun.

Timeless,
the worm at the apple’s core
waiting for its world to end. 

Seculae seculorum:
the centuries rushing headlong.
Matins: wide-eyed this owl
hooting in the face of day.

Somewhere, I remember
a table spread for two.
Breakfast. An open door.
“Where are you going, dear?”

Something bright has fled the world.
The sun unfurls shadows.
The blood whirls stars around the body.
“It has gone.” she said. “The magic.
I no longer tremble at your touch.”

The silver birch wades at dawn’s bright edge.
Somewhere, tight lips, a blaze of anger,
a challenge spat in the wind’s taut face.

High-pitched the rabbit’s grief in its silver snare.
The midnight moon deep in a trance.
If only I could kick away this death’s head,
this sow’s bladder, this full moon
drifting high in a cloudless sky.

Comment:

La poesía se explica sola. Si no, no se explica.

Pedro Salinas.

Poetry explains itself. If it doesn’t, it’s inexplicable.

Mindfulness

Mindfulness

alive in the moment
a momentary cloud
crosses the sun face
brings shade to table

soon page and tabletop
ripple with light again

the pen’s shadow
pushes across the page
while the nib weaves
its spider fine lines
of well webbed words

meaningful mindful
each letter a moment
caught and held in time

Comments:

I caught myself forcing myself to write a poem – and it just wasn’t working. Meaningless words upon the page, each wound up, struggling like a little black fly in a spider web that promised only oblivion. Then I caught the one sentence that ends the above poem – each letter a moment caught in time. I had found what I was looking for. For the next half hour I played back and forth with a whole sequence of dibbles and dabbles that eventually led to what I have written above.

I showed it to Moo. “Tranquility,” he said. “I have just the painting for you.” Love at first sight – poet and painter, painting and poem, blissful in a true moment of blended tranquility and mindfulness. “Why, thank you, dear Moo,” I said and all our previous squibbling and squabbling was laid aside. We gave each other a big hug – I should add that we don’t often do that, as one or two of you out there might well know. But we did it today.

Meanwhile, I have received another set of fake invitations – oh, I would be so famous in the world of fakery if I gave away what little money I own to make myself truly famous – for my folly in believing the permanence of fakery. Why, only last week, I got an email mistaking me for my namesake and offering to help me publicize his most famous book – My Word is my Bond. The person involved was asking for a cool $250,00 for making the videos.

Oh dear. 007 is one thing. 006.5 is something else and someone else. Never mind – maybe one day someone real will call me and make me a genuine offer that I really can’t refuse. I probably wouldn’t believe that if it happened.

Dog Daze

Dog Daze

Memories deceive me with their half-remembered shows, shadow shapes shifting over the walls with a flick of the magician’s fingers. What magic lantern now slips its subtle slides across night’s screen? Desperate I lap at salt-licks of false hope that increase my thirst and drive me deeper into thick, black, tumultuous clouds. A pandemic storm lays waste to the days that dog my mind. Carnivorous canicular, hydropic, it drinks me dry, desiccates my dreams, gnaws me into nothingness. At night a black dog hounds me, sends my head spinning, makes me chase my own tail, round and round. It snaps at dreams, shadows, memories, anything that ghosts through my mind. Hunter home from the hill, I return to find my house empty, my body devastated, my future a foretold mess. Tarot Cards and Tea Leaves are lost in a Mad Hatter’s illusion of a dormouse in a teapot raking runes from an unkempt lawn.

Commentary:

Well, what a muddle. Images flying everywhere, in and out, like Von Richthofen’s flying circus of WWI fame. And look at that last line! Tarot Cards and Tea Leaves are lost in a Mad Hatter’s illusion of a dormouse in a teapot raking runes from an unkempt lawn. No wonder Moo said “Nein!” when I asked him if he had a painting to illustrate this one. In fact, he quoted Salvador Dalí at me: “There’s no difference between you and a madman, except that some days, you aren’t mad.” I guess this implies that some days I am.

“Ah well,” said Mrs. Thomas calling her son Arwel in for tea. Welsh joke. Many won’t get it. Arwel didn’t and he didn’t get his tea either. Never mind. Those things happened a long time ago when the world was so much younger, and, dare I say it, wiser! Actually, there’s nothing wrong with the world itself. The problem, as always, just like the old woman who lived in a shoe, it’s the madmen who inhabit the shoe that are the problem. And when the shoe’s sole needs a nail, who is going to come and glue it back together. Not me, said the red squirrel, laughing. And he always laughs. As soon as it gets cold he tucks into my garage and it’s a devil of a job to get him out again.

What’s worse, he insists on building nests in my car engine. That’s three times now. And it costs money to dig those nests out. Not to mention the mess. First time, I didn’t even know he was in there until the windscreen wiper on the driver’s side started to fail. Then the whole watering system broke down. I took it to the garage, and the garagemen said “I hope you’re getting rent money, you’ve got a tenant.” Anyway, he got rid of the squirrel and the nest. But the little blighter must have followed me home, because a few days later he was back in there again. He’s in there now. I can hear him chuckling as I type this.

Dog Daze, indeed. I wish I had my doggy back. Alas, as you can see from the photo, he crossed the rainbow bridge to his doggy paradise, leaving me to contend with a garage full of ham-fisted red squirrels. No wonder my head is spinning around and I am chasing my own tail, round and round. At least he’s single, that squirrel. I don’t know what I’d do if he got married. I know my maths ain’t no good (nor is my English), but where squirrels are concerned, I am pretty sure that 1 + 1 = 6 or more and a foretold mess.

What was the last live performance you saw?

Daily writing prompt
What was the last live performance you saw?
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What was the last live performance you saw?

Depends on how you define performance, doesn’t it? Here’s one from a couple of days ago. I left the lid of my pot of wildflower honey slightly open and, guess what? This is what I saw inside. Actually, there were fourteen of them. Some ran for it. Some were so absorbed that they just lay there, inebriated. I grabbed my cell phone and took this shot.

It could have been a video. The seven that fled, it might have been eight, looked like a broken line of can-can girls fleeing from the Moulin Rouge. But look at the color of that honey. Such a rich, warming gold. It was, quite simply, one of the best honeys I have ever tasted. And I have to say, that I cannot blame the ants for invading such a honey-trap paradise.

The live performance was the running, fleeing, burying into the honey, and wild whimpering of the ants. Then, when I squished them, it was their feeble twitching, followed by their gradual submission to a force majeur.

The Nature of Art and the Art of Nature – a live performance, followed by a still life. A nature morte, as they say in French, or a naturaleza muerta, as the Spanish say. On the bright side, I like to think that they found their land of milk and honey, their earthly paradise, before they met their tragic end.

What makes you laugh?

Daily writing prompt
What makes you laugh?
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What makes you laugh?

The current state that the world is in. Seems like a strange answer, doesn’t it? Wars, famine, plagues, diseases, fire, flood, earthquakes, drought, what is there to laugh at? All of it, of course. Because if I didn’t laugh at it, I would cry. And crying – well, there just aren’t enough tears, are there? Anyway, as the Reader’s Digest used to say “Laughter is the best medicine.” So, if we want to heal the world, we must first learn to laugh at it.

In fact, there are many things we should be laughing at – politics and politicians, for one. Or is that two? Chuckling away – it’s hard to tell them apart nowadays. In fact, if we laughed right out loud at the folies bergeres who masquerade as wise men, can-can dancers who actually can’t-can’t, and decision makers who really can’t decide, then that laughter would be the last straw that would break the camel’s back and dump them all on their backsides in the desert where they belong. There, they would be voices ‘crying in the wilderness’, crying indeed, for deprived of their privileges, none of them would be laughing. But we would. And we’d probably be a great deal better off.

New words also make me laugh. Homicide, femicide, domicide, ecocide, countrycide – tell me, who makes up these names? Who keeps popping them into the dictionary? And if they mean what I think they mean, we should all be on our knees, praying and weeping. It’s like fake suicide. That happens when push comes to shove, and the subsequent defenestration is deemed a suicide.

Look at Moo’s painting, Burning Birbi. Now that is something to really make you cry. Moo tells me he was going to call it Burning Bush, but then he remembered all the poor birbis who were burned to death in the Australian Bush Fires. They ascended the eucalyptus trees for safety, and there, of course, they met their sad and tragic fate, while trying to escape the conflagration. I can laugh many things off. But not the fate of those cuddly little Koalas, brought to the edge of destruction by our treatment of their natural habitat.

Welsh proverb – “Laugh and the world laughs with you. Cry, and you cry alone.” So, I am laughing at it all. I have to – or else I will suffer a break down. So, laugh with me, and let the real losers cry in the wilderness, hermits all, abandoned to their lonesome own-somes.

Aliens

Aliens

We know they are out there – but do we realize that they already exist within our own heads? They float around inside our skulls, sending out alien signals and outlandish messages. Buy more, crave more, consume more, eat it all up, leave nothing on your plate, don’t give anything to anyone else, it’s yours all yours, don’t share, be greedy, mine, mine, mine. And we cry “Mine” until we undermine our own society and then the aliens have taken us over and they are in full control and wielding total power.

Search for yourself amidst the ruins of your consumer life and your life consumed. Dig deep into the troubled mine of your mind and rescue what remains. Perform an act of artificial respiration upon yourself and create yourself anew, in the image of what you want to be, not what the aliens want you to be. Be brave. Kick them out. Win back your own life. Resist them. Fight them on the beaches, in the bleachers, on the non-stop radio, on the endless subliminal messages cast out by the tv.

Reject the false notion, the siren song that calls out endlessly – ‘j’achete, donc je suis‘ – “I buy, therefore I am.” You are more, so much more, than the purchasing power of your dwindling dollars. Breathe deep. Walk out in the sun and the rain. Be yourself. Make friends with others of like mind. Fight those aliens, wherever you find them. Fight back. Renew yourself. And renew the world around you.

This message brought to you by
the anti-buy yourself happiness campaign.

Waiting for Godots

Waiting for Godots

What do authors do when they send manuscripts to agents or presses? They have several choices. For example, they can listen to the sound of silence. Listen carefully to the paining above. What does it say to you? Absolutely nothing. Quite. It doesn’t communicate. It’s the sound of silence.

Another choice, they can read and re-read Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. Alas, in this case there are many Godots out there and all of them are super-busy gazing at their navels – and I don’t mean oranges. Some indulge in the wonderful world of “Mirror, mirror, on the wall…” and we all know what the answer is to that question. And we know what happened to Narcissus when he saw himself in the river water. Or have we forgotten? Our failure to share cultures is also a sound of silence – two solitudes, gazing at each other, neither one having anything in common with the other one, except maybe the weather. And we can’t always agree on that.

A third choice, they can climb into their dustbins, Queen’s English for garbage cans, and stand there waiting for someone to put the lid on so they can go back to sleep. Allusion / elusion – you don’t know what I am talking about? Well, maybe we are living in two separate solitudes. It wouldn’t surprise me in the least.

A fourth choice, they can take up painting, and scribbling, and drawing, and doing all sorts of things. But, if the phone rings and you don’t recognize the number – don’t pick up the phone. It’s probably a fraudulent scam call. And if you don’t know the e-mail address, put it in Spam and then block it. It’s probably some bot from another country trying to trap you into giving them your bank account details and signing your savings away. Whoever it is or they are , I doubt if it’s an agent or an editor!

Tell us about yourself

Tell us about yourself

That is one of the questions I most hate to be asked. What on earth is there to tell? One direction is the Muhamad Ali route – “I am the greatest!” Some people take that route and walk you down the highway of their lives, everything from winning the egg and spoon race (age seven), to coming second in the three-legged race (age 9), to finishing third in the slow bicycle race (age 11). And that’s just the start. A similar route is the 007 route – license to kill – shoot from the lip – a blast from the past – history, herstory, my-story – by me!

No way. My history is a mystery and long may it remain so. There are many magic moments (thank you Perry Como – my mother’s favorite singer) and many tragic moments. Some might be worth mentioning, most I’d rather keep quiet about. I think sometimes of the famous examination question – write down everything you know – except I can’t remember who was examining who, nor why they were being examined. Sounds a bit like the Civil Service to me, before they ask you to swear the Official Secrets Act.

On the other hand, if a person asks me a direct question, I will try to answer it to the best of my limited ability. Who is Lisi? I don’t know. Her identity has baffled the literary critics for close to 400 years and I certainly haven’t been able to solve it. Why did Cervantes write the Quixote? Try asking him yourself – but I guess if he’s been silent since 1616, he will remain silent for a lot longer. Not everyone is – or wants to be – the Memory Man – “We know Easter is a Moveable Feast, when did Easter Sunday last fall on Boxing Day?”

Trick question – Easter Sunday is a race horse, not a holy holiday. Boxing Day, in Britain, used to be the day for point to points and obstacle races for horses. But the Memory Man knew that. He also knew the name of every jockey, every horse, their weights, their odds, the order in which they finished, and the name of the fence which caused Easter Sunday to fall on Boxing Day.

So, tell us about yourself. No. I won’t. I am not the memory man and I will reveal as little as I can. Remember the old song – “Yesterday is history, today is still a mystery, but what a day it’s going to be tomorrow.” Right – now I am ready to tell you about myself. I am not yesterday’s man, I am today’s man, and today is still a mystery. Sorry, I can’t do better than that!

Challenge

Challenge

What is the biggest challenge you will face in the next six months?

The months change but the challenge never does. How does one stay alive? How does one survive? How does one pass the time from one minute to the next, one hour to the next, one day to the next, one week to the the next, and one month to the next?

I faced a challenge this morning. I got to the shop and could not climb over the piled up ice to reach the slippery step that led to the salted sidewalk that led to the shop’s entrance. Fortunately a kind young man took my arm, and helped me upwards, onto the sidewalk. He waited while I shopped and brought me back down to the car, arm in arm, and carrying my shopping. I gave him a poetry book, Septets for the End of Time, as a reward.

What will be the next big challenge? I honestly don’t know. Starting the snow blower at -20C, perhaps? Blowing the snow and avoiding a slip, a fall, a sit down on a snow bank from which I cannot get up? Who knows? I don’t. I need more medicine – will my biggest challenge be finding that the pharmacy has again run low on my medication and I have to wait for my renewals? I have just had a blood test – three months late – and I don’t know what the results will be? Will that be my biggest challenge – coming face to face with a negative result that demands more action? I just don’t know. Driving out the other day, I met a speeding car on my side of the road, in my lane, coming straight towards me. The driver was staring at his cell phone, one hand on the wheel, eyes down, concentrating on something that certainly wasn’t the road. I swerved aside, towards the snow bank, honked the horn, and he looked up, eyes wide with shock, and swerved away. Brown trouser time, I guess, for that unfortunate individual.

It would be so nice to have a smart answer. My biggest challenge will be to find a solution to the chess problem that has puzzled me for years – how to defend Queen side openings when Black. My biggest challenge will be to draw the cards for a perfect hand of cribbage. My biggest challenge will be to pay the grocery bills as the prices rise. My biggest challenge will be to pay the dentist’s bills when I have no dental coverage and the savings dwindle every month. My biggest challenge will be how to avoid the pain in my teeth now that I can no longer afford the dentist. My biggest challenge will be to crawl to the telephone and get help if I manage to fall in the kitchen and cannot get up.

So, what is my greatest challenge over the next six months? Living from day to day, without falling downstairs and killing myself – how about that for an answer?