Even the Zucchini Cake.
Even the zucchini cake
didn’t lift him;
all our thoughts, poems, stories
we thought
so scintillating,
he mused:
second hand, dead wood,
old hat
stodgy as a stale
haiku
Even the Zucchini Cake
language
Who’s Doing it ?
Who’s Doing It?
Jeff looks around.
I do too.
We both want to know
who’s doing it.
Standing up. Speaking in tongues.
We both want to do it too.
But we’re not ready.
We both wonder why,
if we’ll ever be ready.
Pastor Bill speaks to us
in an avuncular way:
It will come spontaneously, he says.
Like a poem? I say.
Yes, like a poem.
but it won’t be in English.
You won’t know what you’re saying.
Huh? I say, huh?
And the people around you won’t know what you’re saying either.
It will be in tongues.
Ahh, I say, like that poem
I wrote yesterday,
‘Crack/Unfiltered’.
I suppose so, he says.
I get it, I say, I get it.
No one understood it.
I didn’t understand it either.
But I stood up
like a tree.
I posted it.
Good on you, he says, good on you.
*pic courtesy of pinterest
Ibis
They look more like gizmos than birds,
cartoonish cut-outs that flock outside
the house that time has marauded,
freaking out the orange tabby next door;
one gives me a mean-dog look
as I snap him with my camera:
you sneery snake perve, it says ;
‘bin chickens’, ‘dumpster divers’,
they look more like street people
scraggling for scraps than Sacred Ibis
Things I’ve Heard about It
The Things I’ve Heard about It.
It is a cancer.
It is not a cancer.
You will not die from it.
You will die with it.
It is the cancer you want to have
if you have to have a cancer.
It is indolent. Lazy.
And that strange name.
Long as the name of a Welsh railway station.
Waldenstrom macroglobulinaneamia.
Try saying that in one breath.
Whew.
- pic courtesy of Wikipedia
Grandad and the Punatorium
He was considered a pundit on the topic.
He had a secret cache of punography stashed away in his room where he could be heard laughing maniacally late into the night. .
Sadly he was confined to a Punatorium in the hope of curing him of this terrible affliction.
Someone once said you can measure the value of a pun by the volume of groans it elicits.
Grandad had three which he dished out wherever he went.
A pony walks into a bar and croakily asks for a pint of beer. The barman has trouble understanding him. Sorry, says the pony, I’m a little hoarse.
Out on my walk today, I spotted a Dalmatian.
A teacher in a Year Nine English class, had trouble with a girl called Lichen. Give her time, a colleague said. She’ll grow on you.
Boom boom ! Get it? A well-full of groans.
Found
.I drive down one of the backroads of desolation, full moon in my eyes, when I see him, shuffling along, hands in pockets.
Hop in, I say..
Are you still whoring with yr other voices? he asks.
Nah, I say. I was trying them on. They didn’t do it for me. You’re the one I want.
It sounds like a song.
Would you like me to sing it?
With your voice? No thanks.
I was sorta lost, I say. You’re my natural voice. Demotic, lyrical at times, a little looney.
You’re my man, my voice says, hopping in, giving me a manly hug.
We drive on, slow, easy, companionable, the full moon in our eyes.
- pic courtesy of pinterest
Petrichor
She loves the word ‘petrichor’
She fondles it like a pet dragon.
She repeats it during meals
and chuckles.
The next morning.
What’s that word again.
I tell her.
Her eyes gleam .
That pet dragon look.
I never knew one could love
a word so much.
*are there particular words you love, just for their sound, their strangeness?
- pic by deviant art o pinterest
the Eight Minute Orgasm
My heart somersaulted
when you lightning-bolted
into my brain
a jolt
of pure energy
the frenzy
the eight-minute 40 second orgasm
of ‘Purple Rain’
The Martian Inside Me
Comes out every now and then
When I lose the thread of an argument and desperately try to sew it up
When I chat with Tiff in her tank at night when there’s nothing on TV
When I slapstick my way across the mall just for the hell of it
In the bath on Sundays when I sing ‘Deep Water’ backwards, inside out and upside down to give my vocal chords a workout
At the hairdressers when I talk to Simon with the harelip about his dad’s imminent retirement as Lord Mayor of Mars
And lastly when we all stand together in Alex’s Salon and sing the Mars National Anthem on International Mars Day
- when do you speak Martian?
Is it Character then?
Is it the characters, then?
No, it is not.
Scenery. dialogue,
intrigue,
the machinations of plot?
No, it is not.
Really? None of the above?
Then, pray tell, what?
Far more important
than any of those,
he says,
is vivacity,
the vivacity of the prose.
* what is it you most treasure in a short story?
pic courtesy of Pixabay
John Malone 