Have You Ever Noticed?

Have you ever noticed how placid an ad becomes

when you put a cow in it?

Farmers too when they milk?

All my good ideas came to me while I was milking a cow,

the American painter Grant Wood

declared.

Have you ever noticed how much more pleasant

‘The Farmer Wants a Wife’ is

compared to the bitchy, sniping

‘Married At First Sight’?

We should all pat a cow in the morning, hug a tree

if we are to start the day right.

Riot-prone areas, prisons too should be equipped with cows

their melodious moos

soothing the seething masses.

Bovine Buddhas

emblems of placidity

a state we aspire to in these troubled times.

Pounce

 

You can’t swat it.

Spray it.

Shut it out.

Tell it to sit. Stay.

It’s in yr brain.

Waiting. Watching

Friends, fellow writers

That first flicker of success

The green frog of envy.

Execution on the Golf Course

We sit on the deck, sipping our gin and tonics, watching the sun go down over the golf course when we spot a police vehicle drive onto the fairway and towards the rough where the car stops and an officer gets out. Three shots ring out.

Over dinner the head waiter fills us in. A king ‘roo had been hit by an SUV and wandered onto the course badly wounded, terrifying golfers whereby the manager phoned the RSPCA who suggested they phone the police. The ‘roo had been put down.

We drink our wine subdued as the dark creeps in.

Le Coq

 

It wasn’t Miro’s colourful coq

Nor Chaucer’s Chanticleer

Nor the one that crowed three times when Peter

Denied Jesus.

 

It was just a garden variety rooster

That waddled onto the page

When my back was turned

& scrabbled between the lines

 

Before I sent him on his way

feathers all ruffled

Into a sunset red

as a coxcomb.

Pink Hippo

 

You open your mouth. A pink hippo comes out. You scratch your ear, a purple gorilla. You blow your nose, a polka dot egret. You pass wind, an emerald marmoset. You wonder what will come next. You go to the toilet. You piss piranhas. Defecate falcons. Can I have some more you ask the anaesthetist but the anaesthetist has gone, the effects wearing off just as an oleaginous eel slithers from the long wound in your leg from which the surgeon removed veins for your blocked arteries.

Shelby was Disgusted

 

 

Shelby was disgusted.

She would sleep that night in the refrigerator.

She admired its stern solidity.

At least the mice couldn’t get to her.

And if she felt like a midnight snack, she wouldn’t have far to go.

She hopped in.

It wasn’t long before her teeth began chattering. That would keep her awake. Give her away if he was still in the house.

So she bit down on a leg of lamb.

That seemed to work.

She drifted off dreaming of sheep in thick woolen jumpers serially hurdling fences.

In Which Holly Almost Drowns

 

Will you turn off the f#@#ing faucet? Holly hollers. A hippo could drown in here.

 

But you’re not a real hippo.

 

A girl can dream, can’t she?

 

But you’re made of stone!

 

That’s a bit rich, isn’t it? Coming from a puppet made of wood who thinks its a boy!!