Spiral Staircase

My extension cord is kinky.

It winds around itself, gets tangled up in knots.

What can you do?

Iron them out?

I have kinks too.

The world would be a straighter, sadder place were it not

for kinks.

Our quirks, our oddities, the little handbag we carry around our talents in.

How we’re wired, the way we spin, the bands we listen to.

Kinks.

They’re in me and you.

Those pairs of long thin strands coiled like the banisters of a spiral staircase.

Our DNA.

You don’t want to untangle them.

post courtesy of dykeanddean.com on Pinterest

The Beasts’ Revenge

Those rosemary & garlic sausages

we bought

to ‘beef up’ the barbie

in case the eye fillets weren’t enough

were beginning

to stink out the fridge:

‘the beasts revenge’ ;

so when we took them to your place and you declared

your barbie was ‘lamb intolerant’

we hit a snag

so when I said, I’m going to have to put them in your fridge

I thought you would say,

my fridge is ‘lamb intolerant’

but you never did;

in spite of those setbacks

we had a pretty good evening

though when we left we forgot to take home

the snags

so we hope you enjoy them

in one form or another

and no, we do not need them back

My WP Friends: an Ode

.

I love my community of bloggers.

They’re fun.

I love them

Each and everyone.

There’s Hobbo, Beth,

Eden, the Don,

dear old Ed

& a Coyote name John.

There’s Chel. also,

formerly Chelsea,

a big fat can of worms

Little Charmer’s pithy poetry.

There’s eob2

with her eyes of blue

her mystical poems

their music too.

Karen, of course,

her Yard Sale of Thoughts

teasing us with ruminations

her imagination has wrought.

Then there’s foresty Ulle

what can we say of him?

A man , sharply observant

with a taste for whim.

Then like a shooting star,

there’s our phantasmagoric friend:

David, jester and artificer

on a trip that will never end.

Not forgetting Jewish Young Professional

and Sarcastic Fringe Head

like my mum used to say,

you wouldn’t for quids be dead.

So to my fellow bloggers,

one and all,

each day spent with you

is a real cyber carnival.

On the Nose

You don’t see many poems celebrating the sense of smell.

Sight rules the roost, cock-a-doodles its pre-eminence

on every page; the nose rarely gets a look-in.

An anthology of ‘Smell’ poems would be very thin indeed

and would be ‘on the nose’ for most readers.

I haven’t had a whiff of a good smell poem for years.

• I can’t think of a single poem celebrating the sense of smell, can you?
• have you written a short poem, perhaps a funny one, on smells you could put in the comments column for the delight of readers?
• have you a vivid memory of a particular smell?

That Little Guy in my Head

Every time I go to post a poem

About my partner or family, or another poet

That little guy inside my head says,

Hey You Can’t Say That! And when I ask,

Why not? He says. Are You Serious?

You Re3ally Don’t Know? But, of course, I do

But you can’t fictionalize everything.

You take away the bite of authenticity.

So I slam the door shut on that censorious little freak

but he shouts out anyway: DELETE! DELETE!

When Topsy Met Turvy

Whenever you see the word ‘nooks’ you just know

that ‘ crannies’ is going to pop up somewhere:

they go together,

as the song says, like the horse & carriage,

welded together like conjoined twins;

once, they lived separate lives; like ‘topsy’ & ‘turvy’;

a rambunctious couple;

how they got together is anyone’s guess:

was it during a blind-date, or a casual hook-up in

some covert etymological corner

and their chemistry clicked?  

Whenever I lose

a coin or capsule, I’ m never sure whereto look first:

a nook or a cranny?

Once I lived in a unit where there were no nooks

and another where there were no crannies;

I couldn’t wait to get out of either place.

• pic Pinterest by Julie Robin-Wagner

Life Isn’t a Beanbag

I am reading a book of jokes

that looks like a book of poems

double-spaced typing, plenty of white space,

400 pages long.

almost unheard of unless it’s a ‘Collected’

& it’s by a comedian,

the comedian of comedians — Seinfeld

and it’s been 25 years in the making

so you’d think something with heft

like a comic ‘Crime & Punishment’, for instance.

Look, I wasn’t expecting Lenny Bruce or Richard Pryor

but this stuff was tame, kindergarten, Christmas cracker

material, vanilla, timid as marshmallow.

What I wanted to ask was:

where are the pangs, the pricks, the pranks

life has played on you? the prangs of relationships?

Your life couldn’t have been that cushiony, surely?

Life isn’t a beanbag, Jerry. Where is the dark matter?

All I’m saying is, you coulda done better.

After 25 years of  nothing in print,

you coulda done better, Jerry. Will you give me that?

Some Hard Questions

I wonder how often they make love out there in the garden?

It gives a new meaning to the phrase ‘hard on’

I wonder is it a man and a woman?

I creep up to get a better look but they turn on me with a stony gaze.

I just hope they are discreet when the grandkids come over

or disengage for dear old great grandma.

A sight like that could finish her off.

I must say though they do have a marmoreal presence

and no unseemly sounds come from them.

Perhaps they are conscious of passers-by like me, voyeurs

and let it all hang out at night when only the stars and the big white eye

of the moon are watching.

I just hope they don’t get too rambunctious though:

that tap on the right looks a bit dodgy;

it wouldn’t take much to snap it and water come spurting out

like … like …

Discretion forbids me to extend the simile.

Not a Drop was Spilled

Look, I’m going to be honest. I made a mess of this.

You shouldn’t try to explain the inexplicable.

I wrote a poem. Big deal.

People write poems all the time. They don’t try to explain them. They just present them. And that’s what I should have done.

But instead I went all mystical: probably the result of my religious upbringing and the time in the Pentecostal Church when I was speaking in tongues. Well, that’s what I thought I did. I probably spoke gibberish. Come to think of it, that’s what others around me sounded like.

The trouble is I don’t stay grounded long enough. I never have. You heard that story about the boy with his head in the clouds, well, that was me.

So I wrote this poem or someone did —- do we still subscribe to ‘the Muse’ theory? It was sort of compelling and confusing at the same time. Are you familiar with that feeling?

And okay, I put down stuff about jabbering seagulls overhead, and the guy with a metal detector who found something and went a bit gaga with it, like I did with the poem I found in my head, the one I carried around like a precious fluid till I got back to the car and wrote it in my notebook, without a drop being spilled.

That’s what I was trying to do all along. Get that last line in. Well, I did it. Sorry I messed up along the way

*pic courtesy of Pinterest by Veronika Gilkova

Two Pockets

Ever think about pockets? the post asked.

Whenever I buy clothes, I say, I always think pockets.

Doesn’t everyone?

Two pockets. Roomy, Capacious, Like the report said.

The top left for the wallet, the right for the mobile so I can whip it out like a gun from a holster and do a Covid Safe check-in.

.If someone buys me a shirt with no pockets I won’t wear it.

If someone buys me a shirt with one pocket, I might.

Sometimes you gotta compromise.

Trousers too. Two hands, Two pockets.

It doesn’t get much simpler than that.

I like to walk around sometimes with my hands in my pockets.

It helps me think.

I’ve got a dressing gown with one pocket. What am I supposed to do

with the other hand??

I’ve heard that shrouds have NO pockets.

I don’t intend dying anytime soon.

• google Roadtirement Blog for the post and video