Humor

What Bothers You and Why?

Daily writing prompt
What bothers you and why?
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What bothers you and why?

I went to the pharmacy today for my regular shots, booster and upgrade. The pharmacist asked me if I was allergic to anything. “Yes,” I replied. “I am allergic to stupidity.”

Stupidity is a singular thing, but it comes in many forms. The car driver who weaves his car through thick traffic, breaking the speed limit, threading a narrow pathway, overtaking on the inside, the outside, turning a two way street into a three way street by adding a third lane, even though there is oncoming traffic in the new lane he has built for himself. Such people rely on the charity of others to give way and make space.

Then there are incompetent teachers. Not all teachers are incompetent. Some are wonderful, kind, friendly, and comforting. Others are martinets, escaped from the army cage, and strutting the classroom, using the ruler to beat the students into submission. ‘My way or the highway,’ they claim, and what they say goes, even if it climbs to the height of stupidity or falls to the bottom of the well of incompetence.

Goya illustrated the nature of various kinds of stupidity in his wonderful etchings. Witches flying, donkeys braying, simple people worshipping the expensive clothing but never seeing the corruption it covers. So, turn to the Caprichos and the Proverbios, or, if you want to receive a real lesson in man’s inhumanity to man, look at the Desastres de la Guerra, the disasters of war.

Stupidity – a simple word – but with multiple meanings. What bothers me, and why? Stupidity, plain and simple, in its multitudinous forms.

Interesting Times

Daily writing prompt
List 10 things you know to be absolutely certain.
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Interesting Times

“May you live in interesting times.” This phrase, be it a blessing or a curse, it has been called both, is rapidly becoming a cliché. So, are we living in ‘interesting times’? Good question, and I have no answer to it, not one that I would publish anyway.

As to listing 10 things that I know to be absolutely certain, I can’t. And that may be the first thing I am certain about. The other thing about which I have a certain amount of certainty is uncertainty itself. I am certain that yes, we are indeed living in times of uncertainty. Well, most of us are anyway. The other thing that I am fairly certain about, well, 100% certain about really, is that death will come to us all, sooner or later, don’t know where, don’t know when, don’t know how.

So, perhaps I can manage to achieve three certainties – 1. The certainty of death, to quote Dylan Thomas, ‘for all poor creatures born to die’. 2. The certainty of uncertainty itself, to quote Stéphane Mallarmé, in my own translation, ‘a roll of the dice will never eliminate chance’. 3. The certainty that I cannot find seven more things about which I am certain.

That said, I am not all that certain about what I have just written

Situations

Situations

I am sitting at my desk, typing to you.
Many thoughts are running through my head.

I am checking the weather regularly –
high winds and rain are due soon.

Clare has just walked past the window.
She waved at me, but didn’t ask for any help.

The washing is almost dry and needs folding.
 We need to tie down the umbrella and porch chairs.

The cat has just walked across my keyboard.
I correct her footprints. They have typed false words.
 
Now she has discovered the dried blood on the floor.
It soaked into the boards when I cut my arm last night.

I meant to clean it up this morning, but I forgot.
I can hear her tongue rasping as she licks it up.  

Bone Fire Night

Bone Fire Night

Sometimes the sun’s too bright
and we are best, at night, by moonlight,
when shadows flicker and we seize,
in the shimmering half-light,
half-truths glowing in the dark.

In the full light of day, these ideas
take forms, flesh themselves out,
grow skin and bone, flesh and blood,
their skeletal beings standing,
fully-clothed, beside us.

They take on match-stick bodies,
twisted, pipe-cleaner shapes,
or stick their stakes into the ground,
hold out their arms, and turn into
scarecrows that scare away the truth

Do they bring us release from our
darkest yearnings, or are they those
self-same cravings, hankering after
their day of glory, that precious moment
when they stand upright in the sun?

With the advent of bone fire night,
we stack them into wheelbarrows,
place them on the gathering pile
of outmoded thoughts and ideas,
light a match, and watch them burn.

A Game of Chance

A Game of Chance

You make me think of the road not walked,
the path untaken, the bay around the headland
where we never swam, the cliffs on the Gower
that we never had the time to climb.

Who knows which path is right or wrong
when we throw the dice and stake our future
on a single moment of time when, thinking done,
we come to a decision and take that first step.

The more I know, the more I realize that I know
so little and am surrounded by a world
not only unknown, but totally unknowable,
and me with my life dangling from a frail thread.

Sometimes, I dig deep into bottled sunshine,
But find no answers there, just the same questions
swirling round the glass, and the glass filled with
the same uncertainties and lack of knowledge.

I really don’t know where to go, or how to get there.
And then I remember that, if I don’t know where to go,
any path I take will lead me there. That is when I shuffle
the cards, breathe deep, and give the dice a throw.

Magician

Magician

I stand on a tiny platform, high above
the upturned faces of the clamouring crowd.
Before me, the high-wire stretches across
the diameter of the circus tent.

Clad in the enormous shoes of a clumsy clown,
I grip the wire with the toes of one foot.
Now I must choose – umbrella or pole?

The spotlight outlines my face’s whiteness,
the bulbous nose, the fixed, painted smile.
My jaws clamp tight in concentration.

Clutching the brolly, a good old gamp, I walk
the thin wire plank of my current destiny.
One step, two steps, tickle you under the chin,
and I pretend to fall, grasp the wire, and raised
by the crowd’s gasp of despair, swing back up.

Then, a yard from the finish line, I swallow dive,
turn a somersault in the air, and land on my back
in the middle of the safety net as the crowd goes wild.

“The magician works on the threshold that runs between light and dark, visible and invisible.” John O’Donohue, Anam Cara, p. 145.

“The most difficult role in the play is that of the fool – for he who would play the fool must never be one.” Don Quixote.

Painting: Fire Sky by Moo.

Old Man Sin Drome

Old Man Sin Drome

Damn! He’s done it again.
He must pretend it hasn’t happened.
He struggles out of his jeans,
runs the hot tap in the powder room,
removes his underoos,
and places them in the basin.

He adds soap and watches the water
bubble and change color.
He rolls up his sleeves,
places his hands in the hot suds,
grabs the nail brush,
and starts to scrub.

Cancer. He is washing it away,
removing its stain, the smell,
the pain of its presence.
He drains the water and wrings
his underoos, twisting them this way
and that in an effort to purge.

More water now, no soap.
He waits for the water to discolor.
When it doesn’t, he knows that all
is well and the evidence destroyed.


He wrings out his underoos again,
then hangs them over the air vent to dry.
He keeps a spare pair in the cabinet drawer.
He puts them on, struggles back into his jeans,
and hopes that nobody will ever find out.

Wash Day Blues

Wash-Day Blues

“Out, out, foul spot.” Yet,
however much I scrub them,
those blood spots on my clothes
will not disappear. No seas
incarnadine for me. Picking
at scabs, my fingernails draw blood.
with so many ragged edges.

The old, stale liquid flows
fresh again from once-healed wounds.
Why made me open them up?
Was it just boredom? Or that itch
ever nibbling at the mind’s edge?

Tell me, how do we walk away?
How do we heal ourselves?
How do we forgive and forget?
Does the fresh blood wash away
the dirt I feel crusted round me?
Will I ever be clean again?

Wednesday is wash-day.
I scrub again and again
at all my dirty linen. Then I watch
as my wrinkled skin grows damp, scabs
soften, and I open them once more.

Swings

Swings

They told me that one day
my feet would be up in the air,
and the next they would be stuck
on the ground.

A roundabout, they said,
a merry-go-round,
with all the fun of whatever fair
happens to be around that day.

Someone, not me, flicks a switch,
music plays, the carousel horses
move up and down, slowly at first,
then faster and faster as day, music,
and horses all gather pace.

There are no reins. If there were,
I would heave those horses
back to whatever reality I left.

But what is reality now?
These hot flashes that warm my flesh?
Those cold flushes that make me shiver,
then turn up the heat
until I am sweating again?

Shadows grow. I pull less strongly
on the swing boat’s ropes.
My journey slows. The showman
raises the bar beneath the wooden hull.
 
Wish it or not, my journey grinds
to its inevitable end.

Click here for Roger’s reading.

The Appointment

The Appointment

“We have room tomorrow,” she said.
“But only between 7 and 9 am.
Shall I book you in for 8:15?”
“Sure,” I replied, not realizing
that I had forgotten to remember
the joys of rush hour traffic,
and the crush of crossing
the only bridge downtown.

I left home early only to find
chaos at the end of my road.
School busses, cars nose to tail,
trucks, cyclists, you name it,
it was all there, flowing, slow
but steady, with scarcely room
to insert a razor blade between
bumper and bumper. But that
was only the beginning.

The bridge downtown: it was
like threading a four wheeled camel
through the eye of a very small needle.
Crawlers, creepers, slugs and snails,
racing demons, speedsters, all of them
hustling, impatient, bustling, yielding
not an inch of space. My car became
a shuttle, weaving a thread of progress,
inch by inch, through the maze
that confronted and confounded.

I got to my journey’s end at last.
“You’re late,” said the girl at reception.
“You’ve missed your appointment.
Shall I book you in again?
Tomorrow at the same time?”

Click here for Roger’s reading.