You learn something new every day

Such as ...

Turquoise is the mineral, not necessarily the colour. I found out this small fact earlier today when Spike and I visited Mayagems in Avalon.

Old School

An empty room: bare and harsh
with yellow, buckled floorboards
worn by years of aimless use
by boys and girls no longer there;
ghosts in the afternoon
of this half-remembered day
who present yet (in one sense)
will not be brought again to stand in line.

The walls are yellow too: pale,
constructed of the cheapest chipboard
scuffed by careless, long-gone hands,
pockmarked by pins and tacks; a nail
which, once upon a time, held up
a version of this world arranged
in subtle pink upon whose power
the sun was meant to never set.

A four-square window frame: aged,
white paint, cracked and peeling;
flakes curled in the summer's sun
like rose petals at a birth or death.

Light fills the vacant space: brilliant,
a stark illumination that serves less
the fondest memories of old men fading
than sears into the brain all that they've lost.
.

An idea ... much less than half-formed

wThe Twelve Labours of Hercules (Greek: Δωδεκαθλος, dodekathlos) are a series of archaic episodes connected by a later continuous narrative, concerning a penance carried out by the greatest of the Greek heroes, Heracles, romanised as Hercules. The establishment of a fixed cycle of twelve labours was attributed by the Greeks to an epic poem, now lost, written by Peisander, dated about 600 BC (Burkert).

This may go to New York, New York or into a galaxy far, far away and a long time ago ...

... or nowhere.









(Hercules Fights the Nemean Lion. From a Roman Sarcophagus of the 2nd-3rd Century A.D.)

Happy birthday Lauri

State Of Play

I'll see worse movies this year. Russell Crowe is engaging. Ben Afleck is okay, almost believable. Helen Mirren is criminally under-used and Rachel McAdams is sweet. Although there are a few large holes in the plot there's also some tension. Not a bad way to fill two movie-going hours.

Later than you think

I had hoped for more than this:
perhaps not insight,
perhaps not even self-reflection late at night
upon the edge of what some purple prose might call abyss
but some call less than this
or that (which has, perhaps, too much
hyperbole; the desperate man's despairing crutch
upon which leans a barely conscious reminisce
of half-invented halcyon days of youth
or nothing that far back if one is here to tell the truth)
to persuade the tired mind that nothing is amiss
or that the great pretense that life's a bed of roses
or that performances, posturing and striking poses
compensate - in some way - for a dreamer's avarice.
.

Too much Eliot can be too much