On my early walk
I passed a group of musicians
Under the bridge
It sounded like
They were tuning their instruments
In preparation
For a concert
Perhaps a twilight one on the bank
The notes
Bouncing off
each other —Boing boing — like hollow
rubber balls
banjo frogs
amongst the rocks and reeds already
drawing a crowd
You & me, we bifurcate
you come early, I come late.
You like trains, I like buses.
I don’t know what the fuss is.
You my tunnel, I’m your train.
We have each other on the brain.
You like reds, I like whites
you my afternoon delight.
pic courtesy of Pinterest
I look for him everywhere .
In supermarkets , shopping malls ,
along the esplanade where he
hangs out .
Have you seen Milton ? I ask .
But no one has .
Not lately .
Suddenly I need him
this gnome of a man
with the grey goatee .
Milton the Gatekeeper
hoarding the knowledge
like bullion .
Like Diogones with his lamp
I scour the streets
with my headlights
looking for Milton .
I don’t mind her reading passages from ‘The Secret Garden’ before breakfast each morning , if only she didn’t go around the house the rest of the day speaking with a Yorkshire accent
*have you read ‘The Secret Garden’ or seen the film?
*when’s the last time someone read to you?
*what’s the most difficult accent you’ve had to contend with?
If you see Millie, let me know, she says as she retires for the night.
I will, I promise.
So I watch the program I want to see
then watch the program I do not want to see
going outside to check during the ad breaks
rattling the tin of biscuits, calling out her name
but there is no sign; and the stars have come out
and the moon glows knowingly but remains tight-lipped
so I go inside to watch another show I do not want to see
going outside at intervals, rattling the old biscuit tin
looking for the cat that does not want to be found.
I was streaking ahead and then she put down that word. It was on a ‘double word’ score.
Hey! That’s NOT a word! I said.
Yes, it is. I was just reading about it in ‘Body and Soul’ [ a supplement in our Sunday newspaper].
And she bent across and showed me.
What does it mean?
It’s something we used to do as schoolgirls, she chuckled. And she told me.
I was flabbergasted. The secret life of schoolgirls, I thought. Wonder of wonders.
Okay, I said. There are 4000 new words in our language each year so why couldn’t that be one of them?
our words
go round
& round
& round
the more
we text
the less
we say
maybe we
should
speak
‘Graffiti’:
be
short
succinct,
honest.
We were seated at the feet of the Great Writer who at 37 already had three novels published, the latest of which had just won the Booker Prize as it was then known.
“I will tell you a secret,” he said. “one which is not really a secret. It has been known for millennia but it has been largely overlooked and forgotten. Aristotle first taught it in his ‘Poetics.’. It is the principle of Endings. “
We leant forward. I had my notebook ready. “The ending,” he said, “is written in the beginning. There should be only one way a story can end. The challenge for any writer is to surprise the audience with the inevitability of everything that happens. There is no such thing as alternative endings. I repeat, there is only one way a story can end.”
do you agree with that? Is there only one way to end a story?
can you think of a story — fairy tale, parable, short story, film — that could have ended in a way different to how it did?
have you read Salman Rushdie’s Booker prize winning novel, ‘Midnight’s Children’?
It looked like it would stomp any minute
trumpeting in terror from being woken
after all these years.
What had we done?
What if it went berserk?
Trampled on our good intentions?
Pooped all over the room?
[Have you ever seen elephant poo?]
Or, worse, collapsed on one of us like a slab
Of cement?
John Malone 