Limpet
… like a limpet at the sea side
she clings to her inner rock
as the incoming tide
causes waters to rise,
threatening
to sweep her away.
A wind charges
over the bay,
brings a wave-surge,
white water, urgent,
crashing against rocks.
Rock-face
showered and shocked,
the little limpet
clinging on,
knowing that this
is the way
limpets survive,
from day to day,
from generation
to generation.
Old Man
He stops old friends
in the supermarket
and, when he starts to talk,
they stand there,
tapping their feet,
trapped in a doldrum
where no winds fill
their sails to move them on.
He has turned into
a babbling book of hours,
life’s moribund albatross
a warm scarf heavy
on his reluctant throat.
Caught in multiple mirrors
surrounding the barber’s chair,
his tongue is an open razor
constantly stropped.
Cat
The other day, upon the stair
I met a cat who wasn’t there.
She wasn’t there again today.
I wish that cat would come and play.
Her body length is long and thin,
and so is her bewhiskered grin.
She never ever stops to play.
she wasn’t there again today.
I’m being very, very good.
I wash her bowl and give her food
and she cleans her bowl of every dish,
eggs and bacon, cheese and fish,
but never ever stops to play.
She wasn’t there again today.
That cat builds castles, tall and neat.
I see the prints of her little feet.
Her kitty litter fills up fast.
I clean it when I’m walking past.
But she never ever stops to play
and wasn’t there again today.
I put nice cat food in her bowl,
but I never saw her, poor lost soul.
I’m sure she’s only teasing me,
never, ever pleasing me,
I want to hug her and to play,
but she wasn’t there again today.
Old Man
An ancient mariner lives in my brain.
Many seas has he sailed, seen many things.
A knapsack of memories, a snail shell
on his back, weighs him down.
His life: a broken record
on an unstable turntable.
He stops people in the street,
tells again the story of his ship,
trapped in the doldrums
where winds no longer blew.
Ghost days weight heavy.
Does he wait for the black patch
carved from the bible
to summon him home?
Photo: The Museum for the shipwreck of the Empress of Ireland, Pointe-au-Pere, Quebec. The Empress sank off Ste. Luce-sur-mer on 29 May 1914.
Swans at Swansea
Fish nets still stand
on Swansea Sands.
The tide washes in and out,
sweeping our footsteps away.
Nothing remains each night
save dreams of starfish
shimmering in golden galaxies.
Out in the bay, angelic figures,
ghostly, swimming swans.
Age of Spillage
Fingers turn to butter, permit cups to slip,
flying saucers to take off, stall, and crash.
Broken bodies rest in peace and pieces
on kitchen floor, waiting to be swept up.
Worse: bottle tops refuse to open.
Plastic wrapping, flagrant in its
defiance, wages its guerrilla war
against ageing, in-articulated
arthritic fingers. So many slips, so
many precious things all liable to
fall and break. So hard to bend and pick them
up, even with my new mechanical claw.
Birthday
a year ago today
… but it wasn’t my birthday
Buy a balloon.
Make sure the color is bright.
Fill it with all your sorrows,
then let it take flight.
Look: up and away it goes
and all your sorrows go with it.
You’ll feel much better now.
Buy yourself a party hat
and a birthday cake.
So what if it’s not your birthday.
It’s always someone’s birthday.
Don’t forget the candles.
Take a match and light them.
Now let your cares go up in smoke.
Diagnosis
(sonnet)
posted apparently a year ago today
Diagnosed with a terminal illness
called life, I know it will end in death.
For more than seventy years, that end
has lived within me, walked beside me,
sat at my bedside, and shared my sheets.
We have shared so many things: laughter,
joy, victory, defeat, the soul’s dark night,
the winding ways of fortune’s labyrinth.
When cancer called, we faced it together,
and life won out for a little while longer.
Hand in hand, we are together again,
our ménage à trois, engaged in a three
-legged race, blindfolded, unsure of who,
what, why, where, and especially when.
Friday Flash Fiction
20 July 2018
Bistro
LJ sat at a table in a dark corner of the Bistro. He held a plastic bag in his hands and moved what looked like dried brown fava beans, one by one, through his fingers. A priest at prayer, his lips moved in a silent mantra as he counted the beans: “… twenty-seven, twenty-eight, twenty-nine.”
Robin and Will watched him closely, looking for the tell-tale signs that would announce LJ’s return to his former life.
Same-sex couples danced through the Bistro. They avoided this one corner that formed an oasis of severity amidst the gaiety and noise of Carnival celebrations.
“How much does he remember?” Robin looked at Will. Will shrugged and the two men exchanged worried glances.
A whooping conga of men dressed in garish, feathered costumes that revealed more than they concealed, approached the table where the three friends sat. The conga came to a stop in front of them.
“Now what have we here?” The leader asked. He turned to his followers flashing a white, toothy smile.
“Let’s see what you’ve got, darling,” he reached towards LJ’s plastic bag.
“Don’t touch him,” said Robin, rising to his feet.
Three large men broke away from the line and two grasped Robin while the third put his arms on Will’s shoulders and held him in his chair.
“I’m warning you,” Robin said.
“Shut it,” said the leader.
LJ closed the plastic bag that held the twenty-nine fava beans and put it in is breast pocket, next to his heart.
“Don’t put them away, darling, they look delicious,” the leader grinned his enormous grin. He was a big man, not tall, but broad and heavy. “Give them to me, I want to eat one. C’mon, I’ll just pop it in my mouth and suck it.”
The Conga crowd roared their approval.
LJ got to his feet. He was a small man, but wiry. The night-fighter, they had called him. He was the one who slipped out at night through enemy lines and knifed the sentries. One hand over their mouths, one hand on his knife, all sounds extinguished till they relaxed, lifeless, then that one quick twist of the knife and the ear-lobe severed as the dead man was lowered to the floor.
“Wanna dance?” The conga leader wiggled his hips and ran his tongue over his lips, then puckered a little kiss.
LJ’s face turned red, the veins engorged, and his eyes stood out. Nobody saw him move, nobody ever saw LJ move. He grasped the Conga leader’s windpipe with his left hand and drew him forward until they were locked eyeball to eyeball. LJ’s night-fighter knife lay flat across the man’s jugular.
“LJ, no,” Robin screamed. “Not number thirty.”
LJ kept staring at the man he held. His knife disappeared.
“You’re not worthy,” he said, leering into the Conga leader’s purpling face. “You’d dishonor them.”
Will and Robin breathed a sigh of relief.
Comment: Bistro is the title story in a collection of short stories and flash fiction. Bistro, the book, was one of three finalists (and the only self-published book) in the New Brunswick Book Awards (Fiction, 2017). Bistro (the collection) is available on Amazon. The sound recording below is my own reading of the story and the opening cartoon, Belle Bottom Naval Gazing, is the picture on the cover of Bistro, the book. It is also my own work.
Thursday Thoughts
19 July 2018
DDD
[Divorce, Division, Dissent)
Sometimes you wake up in the morning and you realize that you can do no more. So what is it about family split-ups, the pain and ugliness of a disputed divorce, the glue coming unstuck in an already unstable marriage, a financial settlement that satisfies nobody and splits and impoverishes both sides of a divide? And how do you bridge that divide when you are friends with father, mother, children and the wounds are so deep that everyone of them wants out, whatever the costs and whatever it takes? And what is it about the deliberate wounding of each by the others, the permanent scars that will never heal over, never be stitched over, no matter how hard a third party tries? And what right does a third party (fourth party, fifth party, sixth party) have to step in and try to force issues? And what is it about lawyers, when too many guests gather around the Thanksgiving turkey and the knives are out for everyone to take the choicest cuts and what’s left now but a skeletal carcass, no flesh on the bones, and the guests all hungry still and their empty bellies rumbling for more, more, more … and this isn’t Oliver Twist, “Please sir, may I have some more?” though everyone is heading for the poor house and the beadles are also gathering by bedlam’s door with their handcarts and dogs and the full enforcement of a blue-serge law made to twist and torment, though I have never understood the law, especially when it is left in the hands of lawyers, for “the law, dear sir, is an ass”, a striped ass at that, black and white like a zebra, though grey and costly in the areas that matter most. And what is there to do but rant away about the injustice of it all, the size of the checks and now you must check-out the food banks, the soup kitchens, the meals on wheels, the charity eating and boarding houses, because there’s no more roof over the head and the house is sold and the incomes are split and the children are more-or-less cared for, though rather less than more, and the dog is turfed from his dog house and the pussy cat booted from her feathered bed. Rant, I say, rant and rage away, rage, rage against the dying of friendship and the death of love, because that’s all you can do in this blood sport where even the spectators are spattered with the refined frenzy of friends turned into fiends and foes, and this is a protest, a rant against love that doesn’t stand the course of time, against families that break up, against a society that breaks them up, drives wedges and scissors between people once bound by the puppet strings of love, against relationships that can no longer continue, against the rattling of dead white bones in empty cupboards where the skeletons dance their way into legal daylight and the spectators call for more, more, more, more blood, more money, more blood money, and the engagement diamond is a blood diamond now, a tarnished garnet, and where is the Little Old Lady of Threadneedle Street, that spire inspired needle that will stitch their world back together, and stitch you back together when you have been shocked out of your own ruby-sweet rose-tinted world and torn into little bits in their oh-so-bitter one, the biters bitten and those bitten biting back in return, a new world this world of snapping turtles, turtles standing on the back of turtles, and turtle after turtle all the way down until this carnival world wears its dead clown mask and turns turtle in its turn …
I dreamed all of this last night and woke up this morning and realized … I can do no more.
rogermoorepoet 