Jonah.
One moment the house is all lit up.
The next it is plunged
into darkness
as though hit with a heart attack.
I scramble around the black cavern
of the sitting room
for the door handle.
I have to get out
amongst the stars
out with my beautiful garden,
the pig weed and the white magnolias.
I sit down on my little bench
by the birdbath
and catch my breath.
Now I knew how Jonah felt
when swallowed by that whale.
Submariner.
When I’m tearing up the pool
a one-lap wonder
& my goggles come loose
& the water rushes in
I feel like
a submariner
on the
Kursk.
*pic courtesy of pexels
This Time
I went back to the airport. This time I would do it. This time I would push on through.
The first part was easy, driving to the Drop Off point but once you got there, you had to keep on going. That was the tricky part. That’s where I messed up.
That time, the time I dropped my daughter off, I continued through , swinging around the roundabout but that’s where it got confusing, arrows pointing in all directions, a jumble of signs and always someone up your ass pushing you to speed up, for god’s sake.
That’s when it happened. A dark, chunky , sinister sedan pulled me over. It had AFP on the side. Australian Federal Police. An officer got out, walked up to my side window and tapped on it. I was packing it. What had I done? or more importantly what did he believe I had done. This was the age of terrorism. But did I look like a terrorist?
He questioned me briefly, took my license and walked back to his car. That’s when he got talking to someone. I assumed they were doing a police check on me, on the vehicle. All the time I could see him in the rear view watching me.
Finally he sauntered up to me, handed the licence back, and said I was free to go this time, but to be careful where I drove. What the hell did that mean? Where had I wandered?
That’s when I got the fear of driving to the airport to drop someone off or pick someone up.
But this time I did it. I made it all the way. History did not repeat itself. Woo Hoo !
Neanderthal.
You know how you get scrambled eggs, right ?
Well I had scrambled dreams.
I forgot my meds. That was the trouble.
All my dreams were Neanderthal.
Batty, belly up, R Rated.
My Id running amuck.
Skeletons spilling out of the closet.
Onto the sidewalk.
Under the lamp-post
where passersby could gawk.
It was one of those nights.
Give in.
That’s all you can do.
It’s like being bundled
in the boot
of a car,
taken by an alien
spacecraft.
You’re abducted, baby.
Whisked away
in the arms
of creativity.
Go with it.
Don’t freak out.
Forget appointments,
routines,
even food.
Work, paint, sing.
Whatever’s yr thing.
You’re abducted.
pic courtesy of The New Yorker
You scare me.
What did you do wrong?
Once you were the envy
of bloggers like me
hungry for numbers.
Okay, I was competitive
but every entertainer
wants an audience, Right?
And you were the king of numbers.
Then what happened?
You must have been dismayed
as I was shocked.
What does one do to shed an audience?
Put up politically incorrect posts?
Bite the hands that feed you?
Change lanes too often?
Stay in the same lane too long?
Veer off into obscurity?
What?
There is an art to alienation
& you seem to have found it.
I just hope I don’t stumble across it
anytime soon.
You scare me.
*what scares you?
*have you written a short poem about fear you’d like to share here?
*pic by hermes-rivera from Unsplash
I get a phone call at 3a.m.
Who calls at 3a.m?
You think the worst.
I glance across at the screen.
The call’s from Algeria.
I don’t pick up.
I don’t know anyone from Algeria.
I used to get phone calls from ‘my mate’
in Mogadishu asking me how my bank account’s going
but since I told him I’m a pisspot he’s stopped calling.
But Algeria?
I don’t even know where the fuck it is.
Africa somewhere?
But here’s the funny thing.
It rings three times then silence.
What’s the point of that?
Is it a scam?
How can you scam someone unless you speak to them first?
Perhaps he’s inordinately shy.
Perhaps he’s a mute.
Perhaps he only speaks Martian.
I knew a young man once, Simon whose father was the Lord Mayor of Mars but that’s another story.
I look up Algeria on the map.
No clues there.
But he’s there. Somewhere.
On his cell phone.
Now who shall I phone tonight? he wonders.
Whose puffy slumbers can I puncture?
Bizarre.
I was driving to the clinic about my disintegrating blood
thinking about the riots in Washington,
the four deaths,
when Barry McGuire came on the radio, singing his anthem, from the sixties
‘Eve of Destruction’. You know it?
And I thought:
it must mean something, a message maybe but could something
written that far back, sixty years,
speak to the present?
Barry thought so, his voice just as urgent,
just as polemic
as it was then.
Sure, the finger on the nuclear button seemed shrill,
a little hysterical — it’d be more measured now, wouldn’t it? —
but the hate in Red China and the riots in Selma, Alabama,
seemed less so.
He was really getting worked up.
I thought his passion would pulverize the speakers.
I was getting a little scared, feel my blood fretting.
Just as I pulled in the car park,
the song came to an end.
God knows what apocalyptic anthem
would confront me on the way home.
pic courtesy of Wiki Commons
You hear a noise. It’s past midnight.
So what do you do?
You hop up, turn on a few lights, tramp down the passageway. open and close cupboards, bang doors, make a lot of noise.
Then you stop and listen.
There it is again.
Those bloody mice, you say, though you’ve seen no evidence of any.
It’s nothing, you decide, nothing. House noises.
You head back to the bedroom, turn off the lights.
Someone taps you on the shoulder.
trapped in this box
frightened as a fox
staring at the cops
John Malone 