November in Quebec.
Almost winter, dull wet snow
And clothing never warm enough
To keep the dampness out.
Nothing like Dallas it seems
Where, even though the television says it’s cool,
She wears a light-weight suit of pink and navy blue
And matching pillbox hat.

November in Quebec.
On a day that seems to go from grey to grey
And grey all in between,
We sit in heated classrooms
With the first damp smell of mothballed wool,
While black and white New England nuns,
Banished for their sins to northern, foreign cold,
Talk about their hero (and now ours)
As if he were alive:
Alive enough to step up from the grave,
Alive enough to kiss the snow-white blonde,
Who squeezed into a dress that shone like freezing rain
The night she sang her birthday tune.
I watch for tears from the widow’s blank-stare eyes:
They don’t show through the sheer black veil
That drapes her pillbox hat.

It’s ’64 and winter in Quebec.
The ground’s so hard
That grandma has to wait for spring to lie down in the ground.
I think of her as if she were alive:
I feel her hold my feet again,
I see her smiling at the door.
On this sad and sunny day,
In my grey wool coat and matching pillbox hat,
I watch a dark brown box get rolled away.
Looking down at the new white snow and my new red boots
I blink and blink and squeeze my frozen tears behind my blank-stare eyes  
And think I might be Jackie.

She was quite the looker, her eyes a cold blue steel.
Her legs went on forever and that’s just part of her appeal.
He met her in a magazine, then in a glossy print.
He painted her, from Memory, on his plane and off they went.
She flew with him into battle. She was his lucky charm.
17 bombing missions they came thru without harm.
They flew over ******’s Germany way up high and cold.
They faced fearful odds against the chance of growing old.
Then, when the war was over and her boys went home
The wings of war were mothballed; decades she spent alone.


The years of wind, sun and rain faded the old girl.
By the time I finally found her she was not long for this world.
I looked at my Grandpa’s photo of the bomber he once flew.
Despite the faded colors I was certain it was you.
The owners of the junkyard looked with favor on my quest
As I set out to battle the years of grime and rust.
Then I set out my palette to restore each shade and hue
I cannot make grandfather young but I can restore her to you
Her  legs are lithe and beautiful just as I ‘d been told
her eyes a cold blue steel,and her hair a platinum gold.

your hands are the flowers on my uncles grave
wilted like cancer in his lungs
childish games played in the corners of his house
hiding when we heard his screams late in the night
a ticking tocking tick following us from his hospice room
.. / -.. --- -. .----. - / .-- .- -. - / - --- / -.. .. .
that sound click clacked its way into my childhood the way the broken gears on my dead grandmothers clock chimed somehow only on her birthday the way your car turned over your truck turning over your hands turning over .. / -.. --- -. .----. - / .-- .- -. - / - --- / -.. .. . you didn't understand the click clack paddy whack childish game that I thought could butterfly its way between you and me and the trees the way my uncle mothballed his way into my family with his months and dots and dashes  .. / -.. --- -. .----. - / .-- .- -. - / - --- / -.. .. .
my mother gave him his morphine and slipped three extra doses into his system because he said he didn't want to feel the pain anymore
he didn't want to look at me and my sister and cry not because he thought we were beautiful but because he could not breathe
he didn't want to cry and holler in his sleep because his chemo gave him night terrors because his chemo made him so hungry so thirsty he could not drink he could not eat  .. / -.. --- -. .----. - / .-- .- -. - / - --- / -.. .. . my mother could not listen to him anymore she could not tell me and my sisters and my brothers to sit quietly and wait for him to be able to tolerate the pain again
my mother did not want to learn to fall asleep to his cries as well as hers and my fathers and mine
he died peacefully and alone and tired
.. / -.. --- -. .----. - / .-- .- -. - / - --- / -.. .. .
but I still wake up to his screaming
and fall asleep to his echoes

Have you ever
stopped and considered
where all those
typewriters went?

I am just eccentric
enough to do so.

I imagine them in
a heap lofty as K-2
somewhere in
the Nevada desert
mothballed by the CIA
against the time
when words become
scarce and expensive.

In the meantime,
when the stars
align just right
they chatter out

massifs of sentences
that are only
published in silence

and read by rattlesnakes
and passing coyotes.

It is a such sad thing
to outlast your audience.

   ~mce

Once one crosses the forbidden line on the wrong side of sixty.
Not to venture further into the next arithmetical digit.
There begins the journey to another world, even where the angels fear to tread.
All on a sudden one comes under uncountable whammies.

A jinxed land you stray into, full of a craggy jagged reef.
Razor sharp rocks you feel at every step and bleed.
Another shell shock  I devalued you are as a condemned jalopy.
Looks of all you love, speak a strange lingo: you get a creep.

It is anything but the old warm vibes of those years golden.,
Rather an overdose of pity and compassion over-laid with mushy emotion.
A good enough gesture to an infirm or a ******* or one in dotage.
A man past his prime and relevance like a mast broken of a boat sunken.

Written off the priority roster, stowed in a corner,
Dusted, sprayed and showcased as a piece of curio rare.
mothballed with care in medicine on rationed air.
Lest unseen germs of umpteen infections catch them unaware.

An appendage fit to be dumped in old age home.
A social cure-all, as they say, concerned so unwillingly,
A haven as safe as God’s Elysium for progenitors.
To be lionized as the epitome of pride and wisdom.

So adored they are but shunned cannily by every social connection.
A persona-non-grata in all spheres save for gratuitous complimentary doles.
Being in the jinxed circle of seventy is the sin only committed.
A few blessed ones manage to wiggle into the favoured positions.

A few ministerial ballasts, a lottery coup, or a few sine cure slots, a safety net of power & pelf.
The rest for a wallow in the morass of delusive expectations.
Oodles of stale dry sympathy, deceptive tears and bogus bonhomie.
Old raw sores get abraised-the world turns deaf.
……….
It’s a poetry by late Mr S M Ghosh, my late father
An educationist, history teacher and retired principal of  Central Schools,  in India.

Hilda the Honda was mothballed for Winter
now, finally, after all the cobwebs have been dusted
Hilda once again feels the freedom of Summer.
A few mechanical changes have given her
10mph more than last year, amazing,
for such an old servant.
For a short time left of good weather
Hilda will be bombing around our Island
carrying my oldering carcass with her.