Zen

This is Max.

He’s a happy lab.

Bathed in love.

Now he’s bathed

in water.

A dog wash.

Every muscle,

every fibre

slouches in a beanbag

of content.

Max is in the moment.

Which Animal Are You ?

Perhaps I am a porcupine.

I am prickly by nature

& when I forget to shave

I have a prickly kiss,

Like most porcupines

I live alone

except when I cohabit

with other porcupines

in which case, I’ve been told,

we live in a prickle.

When my quills are quivering

people steer clear of the thornbush

that is me.

*what animal are you like?

*want to add a little poem about yourself as that animal?

The Sad, Sad Chairs

Whenever I go downtown to the shopping centre and walk past the Nail Salon I tense up.

Sometimes I hear weeping.

But there is no one there, just John the Vietnamese proprietor.

He is at his laptop.

But the big chairs, the pedicure chairs which cost a small fortune, are empty.

They are sad, unloved, unsat in.

You can hear them crying, sobbing into the arm rests.

I feel like going in to console them.

Perhaps sit in them for a while to cheer them up.

But it’s all right.

Once Spring comes and hits its stride, the women come and the chairs emit a cheery glow.

Forever Outsiders

Is this you in the photograph? Big, hulking, alone among others, a little menacing?

Writing is an hermetic act. Only other writers understand this. It can be seen as purely selfish . “You are wrapped in yourself,” I have been told more than once. “Bloated with your own self-importance.” Non-writers feel cut off, shut out, alone, forever outsiders. I do not know the answer to this, except to share what we write with our loved ones and hope they do not get envious or jealous of our special gift. Or perhaps it is better not to share, to beat others over the head with our little creations.

Perhaps it is better for writers to pair up with writers, like Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath though we all know what a disaster that turned out to be though I am sure there have been happy unions.

*what do you think?

* this post was inspired by Carolyn Cordon’s most recent post

* photo by alex plesovskich on Unsplash

Hydrotherapy haiku

Look at that jetty’s

knobbly knees wading out

into the sea

 

The Slippery Other Side

We came to a fork in the road.

Damn! Which way? Daz asked..

I don’t know, I said.

Never mind, he said. Hang on.

Daz wanted to hoon the car and revved up over a spoon drain.

We went flying over the slippery other side and jack-knifed

Into a guard barrier.

Damn! Said Daz. Damn!

That Green Day song about another fork in the road

playing in my head

 

• pic by Oliver Roos from Unsplash