Some people can’t get over
their arachnophobia
but say that I’m far sillier :
I have arachnophilia .
Red-backs and huntsmen
and daddy-long-legs
I just love to visit
in grandad’s shed
while the backyard becomes
a construction site
where spiders build webs
on hot summer nights .
He came to my fortieth dressed as an ape —
He was hilarious —
Then we went different ways on the monkey tree:
He took one branch.
I took another.
That’s when he tried it the first time
But the branch broke.
The second time he tried it
He was unlucky too —
Police divers pulled him up during
A rescue training session.
The third time
He got lucky.
He gassed himself in his Volvo
In a friend’s garage.
He never made forty.
A little this, a little that
Said the all-inclusive cat:
A sparrow, robin, mouse or two,
A snake, skink, perhaps a shrew.
A pigeon plump down on its luck,
Its feathers I like to pluck.
Nature is bountiful, said the cat.
A little this, a little that.
Yogurt
No magpie in the bus shelter.
No skywriter above the city.
Nothing unusual today.
Only a post about yogurt
About how no one talks to men about yogurt
And how they should because it destroys ‘toxic masculinity’.
That was new.
I was about to ask what it was
When someone jumped in with ‘can you take too much and what would happen if you took it, say, five times a week?’
‘Then you would become more cultured’ came the reply.
Someone else quipped,
‘Yogurt or Go Yurt? I love a good yurt’
Even I could come up with a pun better than that
But I couldn’t.
You’ve got to be fast on Facebook.
Let’s start with what I am not. I am not a poet. I am not a flash fiction or short story writer. I am not an essayist. What I am is a writer. I do not want to be confined to genre or form. Like Bob Dylan in 1966 I am freewheeling. I write what I want as intense or relaxed as I feel the need. I want my writing to shine like freshly gelled hair. And I want people to look at it. And then read.
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John Malone 