Humor

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.

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.

Virtual Reality

Virtual Reality
or
The Coconut Shy

Aunt Sallies, all of them, sitting there,
in front of the camera, virtual statues,
three whole rows of coconuts gazing
vacantly out of the screen or sitting,
mute like swans, with sound and vision
turned off so nobody will know that
they are there in name only, or perhaps
it’s a pseudonym, a nickname, hiding
the true identity of the sly persona
shying obscurely away from the camera.

Shy, yes, but only at first. The ice breaks.
Conversation flows. A jabberwocky of noise
breaks over headphones, crackles in ears,
meaningless, at times, as the air waves wander,
break up, people switch on or off, or,
having said their say, go mute and fade away.

I think of monkeys, climbing to the top
of the temple steps, sitting there in rows,
plucking at the fur of the friend below them,
then cracking between thumb and index finger
the fleas and other creatures they have found.

And that’s what they will do with the work
that other people present to them – nit pick,
quarrel, pick minor squabbles, disagree with
a noun here, an adjective there, a dangling
participle over there, see, quick, give it
a flick, a twist of the wrist, that’s what
the showman said. There. See? Gone now.
And doesn’t that feel so much better?

Now I sit among them, my own effigy
staring back at me like a death mask in life’s
Madame Tussaud’s virtual wax works,
Jolly Roger, another skull-and-crossbones
faking it for the camera that tells no lies,
even though I despise the shown falsehood –
of ‘stand together or we fall alone’ and yes,
I feel myself falling, toppling off the saw dust
piled into the metal cup, to lie on the ground,
battered and broken, but the show must go on,
though, for me, that’s the final curtain.

Spider Web

Spider Web

for
Ginger and Michael Marcinkowski

I do love long and complicated sentences,
stuffed with clauses and dependent clauses,
 and all strung together like a spider’s web,
an enormous web with silvery threads that glisten
 with dew drops in the early morning sun that
blanches them, turning them white, and look,
there’s a little fly caught in this one, trapped
by his own struggles, and struggling even more
as the spider emerges, advances towards his prey,
soon to be his breakfast, or lunch, if he lets his victim
stew in the poisons soon to be injected, and look,
dew drops are falling as web shakes, and threads
tremble, and the dark and seamier side of life
emerges with its stark, black lines, from beneath
the advertising mask of glorious beauty that distorts
reality, as the spider turns into an assassin and the fly
into his victim, and yes, each of us must choose whether
to be an assassin or a victim, meurtrier ou victime,
as Camus phrases it in one of his books, L’Étranger,
though I read it so long ago, when I was a teenager,
studying French in school, and that was one of the books
I chose to read, but I was never labelled, meurtrier or
victime, just trouble-maker, first class, because I didn’t,
wouldn’t, couldn’t tow the official line and kow-tow
to a rigid authority, that walked set lines, like this spider,
the meurtrier, who turned that fly into his victime, and I,
I who could so easily become either, became neither,
but merely the observer, who stands on the outside,
looking in, and watching as the show goes on and on,
year after year, seculae seculorum, world without end,
and yes, the English Master told me never to mix
metaphors, nor to add foreign languages to my poems,
but what if they are not foreign to me, but a part of my being,
as part of the spider’s being is to be a meurtrier, and as for
that fly, well, he is the victime, in whichever language you use,
and yes, this poem is only one sentence, and I love it, amen.

Click here for Roger’s reading.

Time and Tide

Time and Tide

Sitting, waiting patiently for
whatever may come along,
that is all I have left,
save for impatience, anger,
and frustration.

These canes that help me walk
will sometimes slide on the ice,
or catch in a crack and tumble me
forwards, into a stumble or fall.

I can only sit for so long
before a screen or an empty page.
Anguish gets the better of me
and I rise to my feet and lumber
round the house, avoiding
the loose ends of carpets
and the skittering cat.

A dropped plate that I can’t pick up,
the table shaken so that liquids spill,
such events are more frequent now.

I sometimes think I am sitting,
enthroned on time’s sea-side sand,
trying to hold back the rising tide,
that cares not, nor listens, nor obeys.