Learnt a Few Things Today.
Learnt a few things today: that prunes
are prime movers;
hashi are chopsticks;
that sometimes the least visited blogs
are the most interesting
[ kudos to you, Don],
that it’s as good to stand up, clap, sing
& wave your body about as if you’re at
a rock concert,
& that endorphins are the sacrament
that a higher power has bestowed
on us mere mortals.
Someone once said, be in the moment otherwise you will miss your life.
I don’t know about that.
Once I was stuck in the moment.
It was like being stuck in a lift.
I was going nowhere.
Not even up and down.
There was no way out.
No alarm button to press.
No side passages to explore like in a labyrinth.
I was stuck. In the moment.
That moment when at three in the morning
the phone shrieked at us
from the hallway.
I could hear the old Minotaur lurching down the tunnels
of my brain.
I tried not to panic.
Tried smoking a cigarette
Humming a tune
Studying a fly on the wall
Studying me
Reciting my nine times tables
the alphabet back to front —
do you know how difficult that is? —
And then suddenly SNAP
I was out of it.
I don’t know how long I was in the moment.
But I did wonder if I’d ever
Get out and join
The flow of life again.
Someone once said to me, Expect the Unexpected.
It seemed daring at the time so I took it on board.
The only problem was because I expected the Unexpected all the time I wasn’t really surprised when it happened.
It was expected right?
Life was losing its surprise factor.
I felt heavy as a bag of cement.
My counsellor suggested — wait for it — Expect the Expected.
So I do,
When the Unexpected happens I light up.
I’m happy,
Seven year olds will always ask, at some stage when you are least ready for it, the mermaid question.
Granddad, Tina asks me, how do mermaids go to the toilet?
While you are grappling with this one, they ask another, THE BIG KAHUNA of questions, usually in the car while you are driving them to or from some event:
Grandad, where would I be if you and grandma never got married?
It’s the sort of question you need to pull over the side of the road for, but I kept on driving, hoping an apt answer would ‘pop’ into my head. Where’s the Muse when you need her? Surely she’d good for things other than poetry.
I don’t know what you would have done? I mean, how do you answer a question like that? There’s an obvious answer but that might depress the hell out of her, Who wants to be confronted at that age with self obliteration? And there’s the ontological answer but she wouldn’t get it.
I thought I’d go with the mermaid answer. That’d be the easier of the two …. maybe.
I always draw the short straw.
She gets the drumstick.
I should be quicker
more assertive.
Less of a bozo.
That’s the trouble when you share.
In our circle
old courtesies die hard.
The lady goes first.
There is a beach called Maslin
where nude people go
It’s not far from us
we used to go there, you know
when we were hippies
but is there a place for unclad thoughts
thoughts free of political correctness,
herd mentality
to go?
thoughts still showing their wobbly bits,
their stretch marks,
scowl lines?
No.
No Place
No free forum of ideas
of any kind.
No Maslin of Minds
The world can be divided, the philosopher said,
between two groups of people: those who leave
pegs on the line , and those who don’t:
my first wife was a clearly a proponent
of the second school & I the first which might explain
why we split
even two marriages later
I am hesitant to put the pegs in a tray in case
my new partner is an adherent of the first school
though the presence of a peg tray clearly indicates
the second
I pause
between the two schools
but my old self reasserts itself:
a leopard cannot change its spots.
John Malone 