An Altercation with Auto-Correct

 

When I started out on my post on Pachelbel he was, in spite of being dead a few hundred years, in pretty good nick. Now it has come to my attention that he is not well. Worse, he has undergone a frightful transformation. ‘Transmogrified’ is the word.

Literal minded, know nothing, bossy auto-correct is the villain.

Whenever I wrote ‘Pachelbel,’ auto-correct fiercely underlined it with red, saying, No, No, that is not a word.[it is doing it now]. Then what word am I after? I asked. The word you are after it asserted was — wait for it! — ‘Bellyache’. What? Are you mad? I said. How do you get ‘Bellyache’ out of ‘Pachelbel’? Auto-correct became belligerent and I’m sad to report we came to fisticuffs. Finally bruised and black-eyed I over-rode auto-correct. There was no way soothing Pachelbel would become painful Bellyache! Afterwards though I did have a good belly-laugh over it.

Auto-correct is no longer speaking to me.

 

Have you had similar problems with auto-correct?

Dark Spots

There’s an ad on some Word Press posts saying,

‘Don’t Cover Up Your Dark Spots’ and I thought,

Whoa, isn’t that what we’re supposed to do?

Keep our sins and prejudices in the attic,

not flaunt them, like dirty washing ; to hide

our inner trolls. I know what the ad means. I’m not stupid.

I just got carried away by the metaphor, that’s all.

And anyway I almost put up a post yesterday

Revealing a darker, nasty side of me but my therapist

Urged me not to put it up, that there are dark spots,

She said, that are best concealed.

 

On Cannibalism

Montaigne wrote an essay on Cannibalism

But he was not thinking of the literary kind.

Lately, having been ravaged by an uncontrollable

Hunger for poems to post, I have begun feasting

On a number of my haiku, being both salubrious

& delicious, not to mention efficacious. No one else’s

poems were hurt during the making of this poem.

The proof, they say, is in the pudding, which

I will set out before you to decide whether

Such a practice should occasionally be condoned.

 

 

You Shouldn’t have Written That

You shouldn’t have written that poem, he said.

What poem?

That short one about brain tumors.

But I wrote it before her daughter …. I protested.

Doesn’t matter. She needn’t be reminded of it.

I can’t take it back. It’s out there now.

You didn’t have to give her the book the poem was in. Each time she reads it she’ll be reminded.

But …

You could have pulled it, he said. It didn’t have to be there.

He was right. It didn’t. But it was a good poem.  My editor said it had to go in. Anyway it wasn’t about Jess. It was written about a tumor I had seen in Scientific American, how beautiful it was, how like the wings of a butterfly unfurling into the hemispheres of the brain.

 

Are there subjects we should not write about?

 

An Optimistic Place

 

It’s in an optimistic place.

You can tell by the smiley face.

But multiplied some twenty times?

Such duplication seems a crime.

“It’s over the top. Visual excess.

One of you is enough”, my son-in-law says.