It's small, but telling. Your son or daughter looks up at you and in their eyes, the ceramic mug flashes. On it, "World's Best Dad". Or you sit down to look for your other eyeball and "World's Best Mum" embroiders the car seat cover. For foster and step-parents, this is a win. Time to polish your dancing shoes. For those who have spurred the little ones from your own loins, now is the time to reassess.
Safe and sound, as most people understand it, is for the coil of sitting in a corner, knees under your double chin and rocking back and forth in your own pool of vomit and faeces. The notion of "safe and sound" is the comfort of being unharmed and free from injury. For you and others.
Waiting to die is what you do while staying alive. Listening to the Bee Gees all winter long keeps you chafing in all the right places and the sweat stains are the flavour country you can't buy at a store. But the haggardly down man urinating into his own hands to mark his stoop will bottle you up some. So it is, as we age, we lose a bit of our glamour and pick up skin grafts onward to our deaths. Beauty is in the glass eye.
Teeth showing at the utterance of "Thank You" or "Thanks" simply indicates the greater appreciation of having a favour passed onto you (or of evil intent glistening with every tooth and non-bleeding gum). A small sign and showing of politeness, it pushes down any notion of rudeness or ingratitude to continue the everyday churn of a civil society. Teeth, as always, are optional.
Satiation begins at the point halfway between the start and the end. In the same space as the half-length of a piece of string, it's at the scene where the empty stomach, the hungry mind, or the craving soul, gets its fill and feels no more. Where the more that comes comes at a cost over the course of whatever activity unfolds to the folding point of diminishing returns.
Dawn follows dusk as water follows gravity. Dusk soon follows dawn, done after the day is drawn. Gravity, in like fashion, flows with it the folly of water, a drip and trickle leading all toward the lake, pond or puddle. Connecting one line to the next is where it all lies. And lies are where the best kept theories are born. And just as exact, where they often go to die.
Circuit breakers break; the block settles in place, and words are lost in a granite maze. This is inspiration/death unfolding – a paradox: the sundew that closes its leaves on nothing. Starved of ideas, the midbrain, pons and medulla oblongata rely now on nutrient poor soil for three-to-six day pap.
Bested by wanton youths, the elder state of mother nature toddles many well-wronged phrases of her intestinal fortitude. Many such phrases now co-opted by the marketing departments of war and raggedy bohemians in need of a good scrubbing.
Profiteering off the murrain, the Scarecrow of Lisle flops in the wind and demands a man in his early twenties, and of a scholarly bent, to entertain him in the eating of his own words. Not the writer type, he has but the recourse of his library, to the brim of other visions and voices.
Sigh: to, well, I say “to,” but I’d like to clarify. I don’t mean “to” as a preposition, and neither do I mean it as an adverb. No, when I say “to,” I refer to the infinitive marker, that basic form of a verb without an inflection binding it to a particular subject or tense.
Buildings, though built, inspire the building of other buildings by future builders who are turned on to building buildings by visiting the building or by being in its presence.
Music is all but banned in the city. To say that the songs are sanitised would be an understatement. After all, there are three committees to which songs, by obligation, are submitted for approval before they can be performed in public or listened to in private. (Of course, it goes without saying that the elders would prefer that the citizens keep their private activity to the absolute minimum.)
From the stately finger amputating printers of Oxford University Press, the new second edition of the Oxford Dictionary of English has started the run and word is out that times are looking grim for the once favoured younger neighbour of the underscore. The hyphen.
