when she has her fill
Fido takes over

toupee or not toupee
the hairpiece is having
a bad hair day

Fido and next door's doggie
engage in snarling tug o' war
oops that's torn it

dad now looking like a monk
his bald spot badly
sunburnt

darling daughter kisses
where the hairpiece ought to be
claps and slaps: Da...Da...Da. . .DA!"

it is the only word she knows
in Russian
the world is just one big Yes!

***

Yet another poem from the wonderful writing class run by Lisa Kelly. Take two words randomly from the dictionary and follow where they lead you. My two words were "loveless" and "intercession."

HE ORDER OF THE BURIAL OF THE DEAD.

I was remembering fragments out of this as by the waters of the Liffey I sat down and wept.

"MAN, that is born of a woman, hath but a short time to live, and is full of misery. He cometh up, and is cut down, like a flower; he fleeth as it were a shadow, and never continueth in one stay.

In the midst of life we are in death. . .

Thou knowest, LORD, the secrets of our hearts. . .

FORASMUCH as it hath pleased Almighty God. . .

I HEARD a voice from heaven, saying unto me, Write. . ."

******

This poem is interwoven into my life and I actually came to live it for real...it is made not only with words but death and grief and the memory of my lost sister's voice. It doesn't exist as a text or a page for me but only in that telling all those years ago and the ghost of that memory.


LITTLE BOY BLUE

The little toy dog is covered with dust,
    But sturdy and staunch he stands;
And the little toy soldier is red with rust,
    And his musket moulds in his hands,
Time was when the little toy dog was new,
   And the soldier was passing fair;
And that was the time when our Little Boy Blue
    Kissed them and put them there.

“Now, don’t you go till I come, ” he said,
    “And don’t you make any noise! ”
So, toddling off to his trundle-bed,
    He dreamt of the pretty toys;
And, as he was dreaming, an angel song
    Awakened our Little Boy Blue –
Oh! The years are many, the years are long,
    But the little toy friends are true!

Aye, faithful to Little Boy Blue they stand,
    Each in the same old place –
Awaiting the touch of a little hand,
    The smile of a little face;
And they wonder, as waiting the long years
              through
     In the dust of that little chair,
What has become of our Little Boy Blue,
    Since he kissed them and put them there.

From POEMS OF CHILDHOOD by Eugene Field

What lightning is, and what it can do. People covered all the mirrors in their house because they can “catch and reflect” lightning…mirrors leak lightning. It was thought that lightning can behave like light and be reflected. Lightning of course is not light, but a raw, electrical charge.

When large turbulent clouds form, they build up a powerful electric charge through a mechanism that’s only partly understood, although the general principle is the same as when you make static electricity by rubbing a balloon with wool.  As the charge builds, it creates an electrical field between the cloud and the ground.  As that field gets stronger, the air begins to ionise until there are enough ions to provide a path for the electricity to discharge.  Once current begins flowing down this path, the air in that path gets hotter and ionises even more, which lets more current flow to make the air even hotter and more ionised.  Within microseconds, the amount of energy passing through that path heats the air so much that it begins glowing – not red hot, or even white hot, but ultraviolet hot.  For the brief moment that the current is flowing, what we have is a lightning bolt which is basically air heated so much that it acts like a wire in an electric circuit.  Once all that energy has been dumped to Earth, there’s nothing to sustain the electric field, the current stops flowing, and the lightning bolt disapears.  Meanwhile, all that superheated air has expanded violently, in a loud explosion which we hear as thunder.  Fun fact:  This happens somewhere on Earth many times every single second!

So we’ve established that lightning is an extremely intense electrical discharge flowing along a temporary path of ionised air.  Suddenly the original question, about lightning being reflected by mirrors, doesn’t even make sense.  Although a mirror could possibly conduct electricity (they’re made by plating the back of a piece of glass with silver or aluminium, which are both highly conductive), it certainly couldn’t reflect it.  If a bolt of lightning were to strike a mirror, it would simply blast through the mirror.
Now lightning is very bright, emitting a lot of light.  Mirrors can reflect this light, if it happens to shine on the mirror, with ease.  But the actual bolt itself won’t deflect from its original path towards the mirror simply because the light is being reflected.
That said, lightning can do some pretty weird things.  There are records of lightning bolts striking and killing a man inside a movie theatre while leaving the building intact and his fellow patrons unharmed.  Lightning bolts have been known to strike telephone wires and **** people using the phone kilometers away.  The faint electrical fields around radio transmitters (like the ones we all carry around in our cellphones) have occasionally been known to attract lightning.  So it certainly is possible for lightning to enter your home and strike your mirrors, if you’re spectacularly unlucky.  But it could just as likely avoid them.  Covering them up makes no sense, and certainly won’t change that particular roll of the dice.

In the Tales of the Boyhood of Fionn that Irish icon of long ago legend and myth, there is an interesting debate among Fionn and his friends as to what was the finest music in the world:
“Tell us that,” said Fionn turning to Oisi’n
“The cuckoo calling from the tree that is highest in the hedge,” cried his merry son.
“A good sound,” said Fionn. “And you, Oscar,” he asked, “what is to your mind the finest of music?”
“The top of music is the ring of a spear on a shield,” cried the stout lad.
“It is a good sound,” said Fionn. And the other champions told their delight; the belling of a stag across water, the baying of a tuneful pack heard in the distance, the song of a lark, the laugh of a gleeful girl, or the whisper of a moved one.
“They are good sounds all,” said Fionn.
“Tell us, chief,” one ventured, “what you think?”
“The music of what happens,” said great Fionn, “that is the finest music in the world.”
And so as it happens is the music of my little daughter back from shopping with her Mammy and running to hug me...and not letting a new laid path stop her...her footsteps slowing down until I pluck her from there and hoist her in the air. Her little kisses and joy the only music in all my world. Could any man be richer than I with the music of what happens.

Ewan MacColl had just died somewhere in '89 and suddenly he was remembered as the guy who wrote the extraordinary beautiful THE FIRST TIME EVER I SAW YOUR FACE and the gritty ***** OLD TOWN and of course SWEET THAMES.  I so loved his songs.


Now 20 years later I was crossing London and getting directions from Google and hearing his voice once again leak from a car stopped at the light.
Google directions telling me that the real world might be different out there amused me and this poem sat down in a chair in my mind and made itself at home. "Ahhhh howya!" said the poem. "I hear y'are the fellow who's going to write me!"

..she had just cut her wrists and was watching her self die. She was telling me what it was like and was very bitter she was saved! She lived over a pub so the familiar barman's cry was one of the last things she heard before her flatmate came back early from a blind date and found her in time.

The Stones were playing I KNOW IT'S ONLY ROCK 'N' ROLL BUT I LIKE IT! whilst all the mayhem and chaos was going on. I was telling the kids about Norse myth and so the words gathered themselves about this one mad moment of mayhem. Tea of course was the answer and we all settled down with a nice Earl Grey and some nice Nice biscuits.

Van Gogh in England passing places I would pass and reading books that I would have read.

“Where does a thought go when it's forgotten?”
― Sigmund Freud

"...WHEN THE EVENING IS SET OUT AGAINST THE SKY..."

She stood
as if the world

were a mere
bit of scenery

backdrop

a prop in a play
designed for the sole purpose

of making her
look good.

Gorgeous is
the word.

She a universe
unto her self.

She spoke in italic.

Her voice changing font
from word to word.

She had a strange up
and down CaPiTaL accent

that was slighty dis-
concerting.

A simple "How do you do?"
metamorphosing into

hOw Do YoU dO
and without a trace

of punctuation
her voice a melody

upon the air
like music set free

invisibly.

She spoke excellent
French deliciously

which one
understood completely

even though one
had only schoolboy French.

jE m ApPellE mAdAmE mOrT eT
mAiNtEnAnT aLlOns y

She held out a hand
the sun itslef

a mere jewel
upon her finger.

The world had run out
of itself.

I followed Madame Mort
into the nothingness

that had suddenly
opened up.

"Qui...merci!"
the last thing I

ever heard
my self say.

*******

Our first love was made glorious by this sun of Stratford  and now our first tentative meeting after that threatens not to be a sunny day!

Alas! But what care I!

I doth love thee
whatever the weather

if thou but
shine on me

shine

on

me.