Poetry – Page 4 – Achilles & Aristotle

Barge Hauler

Work,
Think,
Eat,
Drink,
Wake,
Walk,
Type,
Talk,
Work,
Work,
Work.

As Aristotle once said: “all paid work absorbs and degrades the mind.” I have been working my n#ts off this week – heavy lifting from start to end – and a good deal of it thankless.

We end the week in a much much better place than we started – but the narrow steam of technicolor bandwidth which is my ‘consciousness’ has been totally absorbed in work, work, work.

For the first time in many months, at the weeks end, I can’t recall a single original or worthwhile thought in the last five days, that hasn’t been yoked to the chariot of work. I have been one of Illia Repin’s Barge haulers on the Volga.

Work owes me this week, I am paid a salary for my labour not my soul. Onward.

Death, Life, Odysseus, Poetry

Pigeon Toed

Cat sat
Glancing sideways
Next to pigeon toes
Facing skywards
A scatter of feathers
Betrays the act
The plump bird
Too often at seed
Had not heard
Soft paws
Presage sharp claws
At his final feed.

Cleaning the fish tank, my eye was caught by a handsome cat looking over his shoulder at me through the back door. Stone me! Feet up, flat on its back, is the greedy pigeon which spends most of his time in our back garden chomping on scatters of birdseed. It’s a cat eat pigeon world.

Eventually I shooed the tabby off as he was playing with the lifeless body. But the dispatched bird needed dispatching. The missus having toed it and returned indoors, indicated such matters were clearly down to me. A food bag reversed and the pigeon was quickly bagged and binned.

As the kids exclaimed ‘yeuugh’ I was struck by life’s rich pattern. I used to be ‘nesh’ on insects, muck and vermin – dead or alive. I’d probably have dithered with a shovel in years gone by.

Today I just picked it up and bagged it. Last week I enthusiastically stuffed my hand down the drain in pursuit of congealed fat, without so much as a ‘by your leave’. Dealing with a dog, a family home and two kids certainly lessens the standing on ceremony. I find ‘yeuugh’ much less toe curling these days.

Life, Odysseus, Poetry

Ham Fisted

Man handling
Pipe fitting
Wire stripping
Fuse popping
Floor slopping
Finger trapping
Pushing and shoving
Dishwasher in
Knackered out

Why is it most ‘manly’ installation tasks come round so infrequently that you make all the mistakes in the book? Having wrestled and heaved the new dishwasher into service, I look back on several now obvious errors of approach. If this one busts I’m laughing – I now know exactly what’s what behind the sink. But it’ll probably be another 10 years before I get to do it again, by which time I’ll have forgotten. A sense of relief but not much ‘flow’ – except all over the kitchen floor.

Life, Odysseus, Poetry

A Much Loved Friend

A much loved friend
Has come to the end
The dishwasher, tired
Has finally expired
I’m left bereft
And swabbing mop handed
The hours I’ve spent
Hunched and bent
Playing messy chess
With cups, plates and dishes
But now it stands idly
Lights out and silent
It shared my pain
But could no longer drain
A decade of suds
Cut off at the mains.

We take for granted labour-saving devices. But you sure notice them when they’re not there. It has only been bust for a day, but the dishwasher is sorely missed. According to a book the missus is reading, it takes less than a second today to earn an hour’s worth of artificial light. In the 1950s it took three seconds. In 2000 BC it took 9 months – the only oil was olive.

Our modern lives are remarkably free of fetching, carrying, scrubbing and cleaning – which has come to pass in less than a lifetime. As I don rubber gloves and squirt washing up liquid, I am briefly (I hope) reacquainted with the drudgery of pot washing.

I will miss my reliable old friend and the three dimensional chess which was packing a family’s pots, pans and dishes into its slightly too small space. A flashy new one should arrive in a week – fingers crossed – but this one has earned its place in white goods heaven.

Children, Life, Odysseus, Poetry

Surprise!

Guilty dad
Feeling bad
Leaving son
To party ‘fun’
Two hours later
The flushed victor
Allays my cares
He’s only the winner of musical chairs.

Kids eh. There’s always more to them than meets the eye. Much like particle physics, if you’re there to observe them you become quantum entangled and affect what they do. Left to his own devices in a roomful of strangers, the boy done just fine.