Story Slam — Teeth
One of my short stories, broadcast in a podcast out of Vancouver.
Just click on Teeth in the link above. Turn up your volume.
By all means, copy and send to your friends.
Rants
Grandpa
Grandpa
Going back in time,
to a better time,
an innocent time,
when we believed
in frost and rime,
and Santa Claus
and Christmas.
Stockings hung
with hope and joy
and filled with
tiny things and toys,
an apple, an orange,
a chocolate bar,
small things
brought in
from afar.
My grandpa, who
had not been good,
with a carrot,
an onion, coal,
and wood,
but a smile
on his face
and his red
underwear.
I often see him
standing there,
beside the fire,
beneath the tree.
He still means
oh so much to me.
Time Folds
Time Folds
Time folds … itself in two or three. A rubber omelet clock, it vanishes over the white water adventure rocks, bending and sliding, folding and unfolding. Riding the waves is ungainly, unseemly. We hang on to ropes, clock edges, reach for outstretched hands, count seconds, minutes, hours, search for meaning …
Further downstream, men and women dance on the bridge at Avignon. Now there are two popes and each one castigates the other, hurling verbal darts, well sharpened, that pierce the thickest of skins. The bridge across the river stands unfinished. It stretches stone hands out towards the other side, but the further shore is distant and the bridge’s fretwork abandons its quest.
Where do we find meaning when seconds, minutes, hours slip down the stream paddled along beside all those hours lost from the clock? Omnia vulnerant, ultima necat: they all wound, but the last one kills. At what time will that final hour suddenly loom and sling its ultimate stone, shoot its outrageous final arrow? Jove’s thunderbolt, sudden, from a cloudless sky? Life’s lead-tipped slingshot and all that we love turned suddenly to hatred? A tremble of the ground beneath our feet? Kangaroos and Koalas burn, setting even more bush ablaze and the smoke from those fires reaches out, out, out, across the bush, across the cities, across the Tasman, across the Atlantic. New Zealand has become the land of the long pink cloud. Now South America is gifted its grey, smoky monsters of grasping hands, those insubstantial nightmares of our childhood dreams, reaching in from the dark to pluck us from our sleep.
On the unfinished bridge at Avignon, the people still dance. In their papal palaces, the partisan popes still hurl the insults of their hit and missiles. Somewhere, close, was it in the future or will it be in the past, the Black Death lurks, waiting its moment. The Great Fires of London sizzle and stench from 1666 to 1941 while religious partisans burn each others’ homes. The Spanish flu invades the trenches and kills more men than the war will ever manage.
Turn your face to the wall, my darlings, as the gentlemen go by. But what do they bear in their hands, those gentlemen, in their minds, those unsubtle warriors of a crazy game that leads us onward, merrily, merrily, not so gently, down what stream, over what waterfall, and into which of the many perils that lie in wait?
Butterflies
Butterflies
Here today and gone tomorrow. Ephemeral. Like all of us ‘poor creatures, born to die’ (as Dylan Thomas once wrote in Under Milkwood). It seems strange to look back on last summer’s photos and to remember that yes, they were here, those butterflies. Outside the window. Perching on the flowers. Showing their varied colors. Alive. Vibrant. Raising and lowering their wings.
Once upon a time, a long time ago, when I wore a grey suit and lived in a concrete, four-walled cell that they called an office, I was asked if I would edit a new journal for one of the institutions with which I was involved. ‘Sure,’ I said. ‘That would be great.’ ‘We’ll need you to submit a title and a theme,’ they said. ‘Sure,’ I said. ‘Of course I will.’
I thought about many things: titles, themes, topics, writers … Then I thought about other journals with which I had been involved in various capacities. Then I considered walking in the footsteps of the Journal of Higher Education with all of its cutting-edge articles and high-powered inspiration. I breathed a sigh of frustration, then of relief. ‘Got it,’ I said, and the Journal of Lower Expectations was born.
Alas, it was a butterfly that never spread its wings. ‘Your services will not be needed,’ came the curt reply when I submitted the title.
Think about it: a couple of years back, there were no bees in the garden: CCD (Colony Collapse Disorder). Last year, there were no birds. The feeders stood empty, and bird flu was the cry on everyone’s lips and the plague on every bird’s beak. Ephemeral. Butterflies on a rock. Australia burns and people are rescued from the beaches where they have taken refuge in the sea. Everyone, everywhere, now needs to live with lower expectations.
Butterflies and birds and bees: will they be back next summer? Who knows? I certainly don’t. But then, I am a true agnostic. I have no scientific background worth speaking of and neither ax no knife to grind on this topic. I genuinely do not know where we are heading. But I believe least those who protest most, especially when they bluster and bluff and try to pull the cocoon of disbelief over my eyes by shouting loudly their point of view. I have eyes. I can see, even if there are no butterflies, birds, or bees to be seen. Alas: I can still see and suffer their absence.
Please
“will ye no come back again?”
Poor kangaroos, kookaburras, koalas,
wallabies and platypus ducks.
We will miss you so much if you any of you,
let alone all of you,
along with the butterflies, birds, and bees,
go AWOL.
The Yfory* Tower
The Yfory* Tower
“Tomorrow never comes,” they told me,
because, by the time it gets here,
it’s already today.
All my tomorrows are woven into today’s
threads of mist that weave silk scarves
around the open-mouthed trees,
ensuring their silence
Silence, save for click of cat’s claws,
slither of pen over page, tapping of keys,
letters turned into words, words that worm
their way over the page, soundless, into my head.
Geese fly high, arrowing their way to the south.
Autumn is on the wing as days shorten.
Cold weather will be here tomorrow
even though they tell me that tomorrow never comes.
Beethoven rewrites the Fifth. I refuse to open the door
when the postmen knocks, bearing his fatal message.
I guess he’ll be back tomorrow, although they tell me
that tomorrow never comes.
Yfory*:
Yfory, the Ivory Tower, means tomorrow in Welsh.
Sheep
Sheep
I wear the hide of the sheep
they slaughtered for me
twenty-three years ago
in Oaxaca, Mexico.
Like a sheep led to slaughter
I wait in the waiting room
along with other willing victims.
Heads down, silent, we clutch
open magazines, but do not
lift our heads or make eye contact.
In World War One, French troops
bleated like sheep as they marched
in tight columns towards Verdun.
They were disciplined and decimated,
one in ten shot for cowardice.
Is it cowardly to sit here, shivering,
glum faced, as we await
bad news and an uncertain fate?
I hate this uncertainty,
this inability to know what
is happening to my body.
Knowledge I can face, but
not doubt’s shadow dancing
like a will-o’-the wisp, and
leading who knows where,
keeping me awake as it did,
last night, stoking my fears
into this red-hot furnace
filled with burning coals
of fierce, fired-up doubt.
True bravery is to know fear,
to face it, and to face it down,
and to laugh in its face even
though your heart is breaking
and your gut tells you to run,
now, before it’s too late.
Treason
Treason
The cans betray their contents.
Bulmer’s Strongbow cider,
used to be from Herefordshire,
pale and dry,
now made in Amsterdam
from apples that have never seen
Hereford nor heard of the Malverns.
Somerset cider,
not made in Zummer Zet,
apples never falling
from zyder apple trees,
but born in Denmark
with value added sucrose
and an extra sweet taste
that would never be allowed
in a Wurzel song
about schoolboys and satchels.
No self-respecting
Zummer Zet head master
would allow such muck
in his school when local Scrumpy
was available at twice the taste
and half the price.
I can see the school note now:
“Next time send proper zyder,
Zummer Zet made.
This growing boy of yours
needs real apple juice
and lots of Vitamin C
to keep his young cheeks
red and rosy.”
Dozy basturds these furriners,
stuffing their cans with false fruit
and sucrose, taking in vain
those sacred names:
Strongbow, Hereford, and Zummer Zet.
Pax amorque
Pax amorque
“Nowhere did she find peace and love
save in the dregs at the bottle’s bottom.
She solved life’s dilemmas with her whisky
aides: Johhny Walker, Glenfiddich, Bell’s.
Doctors told her that she must stop drinking,
not stoop to conquer yet another bottle.
The remedies they suggested didn’t suit her.
Family and friends lectured her in vain.
She knew she would not live forever,
no matter what the religious told her.
She opened bottle after bottle of Bell’s
Scotch whisky and hid them everywhere,
all over the house and garden so she could
always have one more before the road.
She drank until darkness overcame her.
Conquered by Shadows, she never emerged.”
Comment:
A found poem, overheard.
Pax amorque is the Latin for peace and love.
Words Overheard
Words Overheard while Waiting
“Just one of those things,” an old woman whispers,
“my husband gone and me alone with all the grand
kids.” “Was it four years ago?” her friend says.
I remember his name, but I forget his face.”
“I’ll cope somehow, and the fourteen-year old,
with her belly starting to swell.” Silence wraps
a warning scarf around their flapping mouths.
Lives and worlds end and begin. Back turned
to their words, I listen to them talk. They chatter
about friends, family, acquaintances, giving
intimate details of childlessness from cancers
and sudden sicknesses, all laid out before me,
willy-nilly, to root and grow in my listening mind.
Never will I put a face to the girls with breast cancer,
the overweight women with diabetes, the old men
with their heart attacks, strokes, and damaged brains.
Fine dust dances in a sun ray. Floating motes,
my lost loves, buried before their proper time.
Autumnal
Autumnal
Skeletal rattle of autumn trees their crisp,
leaves fallen beneath barren branches.
Rat-a-tat rap of dead bone music dries out
flowers, shakes seed pods. Summer’s end
yammers its ruby-sweet, rose-tinted world
where petalled hope and October carnival,
with its ghoulish goulash, mish-mash mix
far-fetched mismatched face. Gruesome
uniforms, fairy-faced, gauze-winged, facile.
Cadaverous danse macabre of death mask
clowns posing distorted in a hall of mirrors
for selfies. The drowned moon needs a kiss
of life. Last night, she peeped through my
window and nuzzled me. This morning my
head is full of mystery, poetry, and dreams.
I analyse them. None of them make sense.
rogermoorepoet 