Axe Throwing
My daughter has been Axe Throwing with some friends from work.
Apparently it is the new thing.
It’s a bit like darts only more dangerous,
I’ve been hit with a dart in the hand,
Being hit with a hatchet would be a totally different thing.
People are encouraged to bury the hatchet in the target not in each other.
This is not ‘Vikings’.
It looks like fun. I’m thinking of going along.
But I keep thinking of real heads I’d like to bury the hatchet into.
Is it okay to take a post down?
I took a post down the other day
but no one noticed,
said anything.
Look, it had its chance.
But no one came up and asked it
to dance.
It slumped, sad and neglected on the page,
loudly weeping.
You can’t have that on a public forum.
It’s like that Philip Hodgkins poem, ‘Shooting the Dogs’.
I had to take it down to the basement,
put it out of its misery.
I just hope no one was watching.
When people ask me, did you have any inkling in all that time you knew him, I say, not really, then I think of the incident in the restaurant,the one that slipped beneath my notice in what was meant to be a piece of devilish fluff in ‘No Sympathy ….’
It began in the third line: Hey! Is that a glass of water you threw over me? That’s when autobiography took over and followed us out onto the sidewalk where I was shoved to the ground when my back was turned and my mate who had turned rogue did a runner.
So did I know? Did I suspect? I sure did: in those moments he unleashed diminutive, haiku-sized bursts of anger, I could feel the embers of a conflagration 18 years before that the forensic squad, armed with new evidence and methods of detection, were sifting through and building a case.
His mate, Dale , who let him stay on his property at Second Valley in a caravan while he got his life together, fell victim to Adrian’s wrath.
All that time Adrian proclaimed his innocence, He was the only suspect. He lived at my place for a while, He rode a bike, did the gardening, spoke to the kids, Everyone loved him. A top bloke, they said. Then the night ….
Once my friend was charged with the cold case and sentenced, he finally admitted to us: Just think, he said, 15 years for five seconds of madness.
That little haiku of a revelation warned me that of all the affairs we have to manage in life, our temper comes first.
Bad things happen in basements
we know
the Id beneath the floorboards
so Lester’s wife should have thought twice
about mocking his masculinity
in their basement
by the clothes dryer that doesn’t work well;
now Linda doesn’t work well either.
Badasses and Babadooks bide in basements
& the offspring of Horror Writers’
brains.
So the next time someone offers to take you
down the basement
or hop into a car boot
or trunk
if they’re North American
that basement of motor vehicles
don’t!
The cat is the forgotten candidate when they fight:
sure, they hurt each other but the cat recoils too,
even the walls and lounge chairs at the suddenness,
the squall of this. The walls and sofas cannot move,
but the cat can. Exit, pursued by bear. Only small,
but with the memory of an elephant. The cat remembers
long after they forget.
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.
1
The spider’s squandered his chances.
The fly sits on the shelf.
The sun preens itself in the mirror
Studying the glory of itself
2.
Deposited on the mat
Early one morning
A furry centaur
A gift from cat
Half bloodied stalk
Half grey rat.
‘The tooth doesn’t seem to want to come,’ said the dentist.
‘I can see that,’ I said, holding grimly onto the chair.
‘Can you get up and give us a hand?’ he said.
‘What about your assistant?’
‘She’ll never be able to handle this. It’s a two-rooter.’
‘Okay, then,’ I said, hopping out of the chair. We both gripped the pliers, yanking together. It wouldn’t yield.
‘Could you put more oomph into it?’ he said.
So I gave it all I had and the dentist did too. We pulled and pulled and pulled. The dentist really had some biceps. Any minute now ….
Suddenly we fell backwards as the tooth yielded to superior force.
‘There, that did it,’ said the dentist pleased as I climbed back into the chair. ‘It’s amazing what a second pair of hands can achieve.’ he added holding up the bloodied tooth.
‘It certainly is,’ I said, blood streaming from my mouth.
“You’ve got a Hyde, Dr. Jekyll”,
the psychoanalyst said.
“One of you must be put
permanently to bed!”
“No, No, Not I,” Mr Hyde flared,
Whereupon the room noisily
went red.
They came at me when I was at my most vulnerable.
I had just got up
And gone outside to pee
and was crunching on a few cheese crackers.
“Give us yer loot!” the big one intimated
With hard, implacable eyes,
Big bony dagger drawn.
So I did
Throwing the crackers at them.
They grabbed it in their beaks and flew off
Black cloaks drawn around them
Into the big blue sky.
John Malone 