The woman next door is howling with pain.
It is 3 in the morning.
Clearly she is doing it harder than me.
I went in ten days ago
with a high fever
and within 24 hours my frail craft
had sailed off into the South Pole
where I was hit with pneumonia
and racked with pain.
It was Scott of the Antarctic meets ‘The Thing’.
I’m in calmer waters now.
Five days with minor ailments.
They’ve brought me into dock.
Going home today.
*pic courtesy of pinterest
Last Dance.
Look at them skedaddle along the sidewalk
like runaways, dash across the boulevard,
full of beans, reckless as buccaneers,
realizing perhaps this could be
their last dance
before Winter
closes the whole show down.
Late Autumn sun
Lift the blinds
Sun streams through
and strokes me
spread on the soft blue sheets
in my striped woolen jumper
and I purr
It’s like an ambush when you’re drifting off to sleep
a kookaburra in yr throat
an earth tremor in yr lungs
an opponent in yr bed
a double rainbow popping up in yr thoracic sky
lit up with pain
like that late train to Bedfordshire forging thru the Valley of Rumbles
a cock-eyed gift from the gods when you’ve run out of things to write about
it;s gentler than Golden Staph and comes with a puckish name
hiccups
but all you’d like to do is clobber it over the head
And a sudden thought occurred to me: if you wanted to overcome an opposing army
all you’d have to do is infect them with the hiccup virus and they’d lose the will
to fight !
Stan Laurel Syndrome.
At the Blood Clinic I got a call
from my daughter
to give mum a birthday wish
and to please clear up the nice mess
I’d got her into,
I am always putting my foot in things.
It’s a gift.
Life.
One pothole after another.
*pic courtesy of pinterest
Mystic Mauve.
I’m eight miles high again, sweet Jesus
branded on my feet
been smoking that purple rain again
though I have no one to meet
in the jingle jangle morning
mauve shadows are forming
& I’m running out of time
still tryin’ to catch the wind, sweet Mary
still one toke over the line
Like an Animal.
I hear it like the sea
from four or five streets away
faint, soft
like a cuddly toy
but when I sit outside
in the car port
where the barbecue is
it smashes into me
like an olfactory wave
a phantosmia of
chops, Frenched lamb cutlets
sizzling on the grill
and me, grabbing them by the hands
ripping into them
tearing the meat off like an animal —
& I know then
my appetite is back.
Mystery Ships.
When he gets up to go to the toilet in the middle of the night,
she’d be there
or on the way back to his room after pausing in the kitchen
for a glass of milk,
she’d be in the hallway,
with her axolotl stare.
Time after time.
Passing ships in the night.
He’d look at her, and she at him,
sometimes a twitch of understanding, affection,
then they’d both look away.
After eight years, off and on,
they were still a mystery to each other.
Her cat. Not his.
They’d never bonded.
Aisle Man.
I like to sit at the end.
The aisle seat.
At the cinema
concerts
church.
That’s where action heroes would sit,
I imagine.
Not in the middle of Row 22, for instance,
cramped on either side
like cattle in a truck.
No, Vin Diesel, John Wick , for instance,
would sit on the aisle,
close to the exit,
primed for action,
its sudden summons
like me
if only to take a phone call
or toilet break.
A Short Story is Not a Car.
At the writers’ group, the first one I went to,
we were issued a list of things to check
when we’re critiquing each others’ stories,
the usual things like plot, character, setting, dialogue.
We’d put a tick or a cross depending whether the requirements were met.
All well and good.
Yet I couldn’t help thinking of the checklist that mechanics fill out
when they’re servicing your car.
So I said,
“A short story is not a car!”
This put a brake on proceedings.
They didn’t know what I was driving at.
but I felt I was onto something.
I pushed the pedal even further.
We were heading for a collision,
the tutor and me.
I didn’t know what the perfect metaphor was
nor did anyone else
but I was darn sure it wasn’t a car.
John Malone 