52/356: Old

[rejectomorph]

Today's weirdness arrived courtesy of various tubes and cavities of mysterious (if any) purpose inside my head which, now and then, make the sounds of breathing or swallowing or chewing or sniffing and such I make sound extra loud in my ears, while the ears themselves (the inner parts that hear) seem to start making noise themselves (little pops and clicks and such.) And I now realize that that sentence is too long and convoluted to make any sense at all, but I don't feel like starting over, and maybe the phenomenon can't be sensibly described anyway. So I'm giving up and just saying the part of my body falling apart today is making weirdness happen in my ears. IYKYK.

Anyway, sleep was all catawampus Saturday, and I am more discombobulated than usual, and I had recourse to music videos on YouTube in a vain attempt to reset my raddled brain, and that was pretty much all that came of the day. Happily, there is nothing planned for anytime soon, so the disruption will not spread very far. The next atmospheric river scheduled to inundate the region arrives Tuesday, and the next actual event-like thing in my life will be online grocery shopping this coming Friday, buy which time the storm will have passed. I see no likelihood of great disaster in any of this. Just the usual minor inconvenience. I expect I'll be tired a lot, and will sleep a lot, aka same old same old. Old old old old.




Sunday Verse

Sometimes Gladness

by Bruce Dawe

Sometimes gladness crooks me like an arm
Adoro te or some more crazy hymn
scrambling like a monkey up a rope
to bang for hours in my soul’s swung bell
that I was born and blessed with the broad thumb
of sheer stupidity and doused unknowing
in such uncertainty I only need
to run my tongue across my lips to taste
the salt of that immersion     
                             Down the aisle
come all my years, none altogether miserable, none
without the saving grace of some mistake that bent me
in the sly human shape I recognise
—day-labourer slouching in at the ninth hour
to pick up a quick penny Oh ordinary
holiness of people shining out
against the blurred reredos of their dreams!

I never knew a friend who did not leave me
the richer for the knowing, pour them on
—I wait for the friends I’ve yet to meet who crowd
like seasons, apt, amenable, beyond
the familiar ambiguity of the hill.

Along each vein like air-bubbles children run
and when the heart bursts suddenly or descends
in swooning spiral to the lonesome ground
and the grasses with their dry blank commentary
are all the cushion one can choose
who knows but what some last
galvanic impulse will upraise the arm
or squeeze the throat to whisper while it can:
‘There is nothing in life as beautiful as life…’?