Monthly Archives: November 2020

I’ve well surpassed my quota of 14 stanzas for this November but, though I’m being called to attend to pressing matters involving the vacuum cleaner, storage shelves and other important things, I’m squeezing in one more to make it a round twenty:

November verse 20: Approximately
fourteen ways to start a stanza
Take a phrase that makes you cranky,
melts your heart, or stirs your mirth,
from politician being wanky
or tweeter somewhere else on earth.
Steal the first words of a novel.
Quote a tiny friend's sweet waffle.
Parody a famous line
from Hamlet or source less divine.
See dead words that serve transactions –
shake them, turn them upside down.
Lay bare your heart and find a noun
or verb that lurks there. Let distractions
be your helpers. Take a thought
and tie it in an eight-word knot. 

That’s it for 2020. Normal transmission will resume tomorrow.

In a creative writing class I took part in years ago, we did an exercise of walking around the block then coming back and writing down everything we saw. It would be impossible to do that in 14 lines for my five minute walk to the shops, but here’s a partial account.

November verse 16: A walk to the shops
Dotty silver snail trails, roses,
skittish skinks and lorikeets,
gardeners, leaf blowers, hoses,
cafe tables on the street,
three crossword collaborators
(quick, not cryptic), Uber waiter,
handless Lady of La Vang,
cloth monkey left to hang,
stroller, skateboard, backward trolley,
taxi revving at the rank,
homeless regular, eyes blank,
child who's spilled a bag of lollies.
In my ears Waleed and Scott
untie existential knots.

Maybe line 7 needs explanation. Here she is, in someone’s beautifully tended front garden:

November verse 14:
On waking from a dream of a friend
who has been dead for many years

You left a note and neatly folded
clothes beside the famous cliff;
left the life and loves you'd shouldered;
vanished. But you left a whiff
of disbelief, and time's a traitor:
someone found you decades later,
now not Damien but Bob,
in Tassie with a uni job.
No note this time, a rope your chosen
tool: your mother mourned you twice.
This time there was no artifice.
Yet last night to my dream, unfrozen,
fugitive from death you came,
with warnings not to say your name.

November verse 12: 
After a colonoscopy and gastroscopy
as a public patient

Would this have sent Narcissus crazy – 
sight no Ancient Greek has seen,
these gleaming tunnels, pink and mazy,
fleshy caves, mine, on a screen?
From uvula to pre-pylorus,
caecum down to anal torus,
contours of the GI wall:
the tiny camera sees all,
and it's all lovely. But aesthetics 
aren't the reason we're all here.
Snip! Snip! Polyps disappear.
And all for free, no big dramatics.
Britons love their NHS.
It's Medicare that I will bless.

I couldn’t work this into the verse, but I learned the wonderful word dolichocolon, as in, ‘The colonoscopy was somewhat difficult due to [sic] dolichocolon.’ The word has nothing to do with chocolate, as I almost hoped, but signifies an abnormally long large intestine, which now we all know I have.

November verse 11:  On the eve of a colonoscopy

Remember when examinations
meant you burned the midnight oil?
Tomorrow's test needs preparations
physical – not mental toil.
A liquid diet, no food that's solid,
and pico/glyco prep. The squalid
details of what happens next
I'll spare the reader of this text.
But I'm not spared. Today my body
puts its workings centre stage
and just won't tolerate delays.
I can't go out. I must be ready.
'Watery' just isn't it.
I'd die for a banana split.

Maybe this will turn out to be the first half of a story.