Night Revellers

Interesting, I thought I had lost the ability or thought to write poetry, it's been over six months. But tonight, listening to the drunken passerby's beneath my window even in the midst of deep winter, I was inspired; by what, I'm not quite sure, I guess that's up to you to derive what meaning you wish.

The drunken shouts of weary passerby’s

Float across the window, piercing my rest

The night so vibrant with their cheerless cries

Their clothes now sodden from their drunken zest

I watch them far above as from the street-

I see them stumbling, miseries confessed

As floating to my ears they should just meet

and yet I cannot heed their garbled tongue

shackled as I am by deepening sleep

Into the farther reaches, I am hard flung

into the deepest dreams of ecstasy and delight

Into the regions of the endless night

Four days until the dreaded day. Two exams on Friday.

I'm trying to study but I think my motivation jumped out the window about two hours ago and as for my brain it keeps going into cooking tangents which doesn't really help me explain the themes of blindness and seeing within the play Oedipus.

Never let anyone tell you Greek myth is good for kids to read. It is the most screwed up thing you'll ever come across, the number of people who killed each other and then cooked their kids, or had incest with their mothers and daughters is just creepy. I will never look at Agamemnon the same way again. Not that I ever looked at him in the first place (could be difficult) but metaphorically speaking anyway. And I haven't even looked at the Anthropology material for my other exam, which can just wallow in a cupboard until I have time for it.

On a side note, I'm reading the Unseen Academicals by Terry Pratchett and gosh, it is good. The fact that one of the main characters is called Nutt just epitomizes it for me.

And for some strange reason I'm craving Indian food. Rather badly.

Ah, Oedipus is calling to me, I really do need to study how he accidentally ended up killing his father and sleeping with his mother...and I thought Ancient Egypt was bad.

Wish me luck!

A Five year-olds Mind

They're all arrayed out in front of us, the colours of the rainbow, in order. The packet must hold about twenty of them, all different colours and better yet, flavours. There's chocolate and strawberry and apple and blackberry, we have't worked out the others ones yet, but we will, given a little more time and munching.

Half an hour later and we both feel pretty ill, we think we might die but we are trying not to discuss that possability, it's too dire. So we lie on my pink carpet groaning in misery and trying not to think about it instead.
We have of course by this point decided we sorely regret our actions, but we have also worked out that the chocolate one tastes the best. The nibble marks are more obvious on that one.
Feeling somewhat better, we carefully pack away the multi-coloured set, ready for the next time the inclination strikes us to consume the flavourful objects.

We are five years old, and have happily eaten our way through my flavoured lipbalm set.

Baths

I had an epiphany today.

There I was, mourning the passing of summer and the creeping fingers of winter, lamenting the changing of seasons to my friend. We were both freezing, unused to the chill breath of winter, when one of us struck upon an idea. A bath!
What could be better then taking a hot sweet scented bath when the cold overcame you? It was a splendid idea.
However, then I remembered the shortcomings of baths and indeed, why I took them so little.
Boredom.
Alright, so I get bored easily, so sue me.
So when you first sink into that warm lovely water it feels like heaven on earth, your worries wash away and you are surrounded by warmth. But after a while, you get too hot, and bored, and irritated and it turns into a whole fiasco which is too bothersome to go through with.
So I don't take baths.
But then, my friend struck upon an idea.
"I'm going to go read by awesome book in the bath now" she told me smugly.
I blinked. Reading? In the Bath? How odd.
"Won't your book get wet?" I asked stupidly.
There was a laugh, "No, you hold the book above the water and read. Haven't you ever done that before?"
Suddenly a world of possabilities opened up to me. You could read in the bath??
Spectacular.
I immediatly rushed to try the novel idea, and found it wanting.

And that my friend, is how I discovered reading in baths.
Try it, you know you want to.

Death Row

You always hear people talking about walking the walk of life, but you rarely hear about walking the walk of death.
Walking from Death Row, down the corridor shackled by your hands and feet, prison guards on both sides, approaching the iron door where within lie the impliments of death that will end your miserable life.
Death Row is a place of hell on earth, solitary confinment for months, years on end, with only your thoughts for company, many go mad.
And all you can do is wait.
How can it be a kindness, allowing you to choose your last meal on earth? Do they really think you can enjoy it? knowing you are only hours away from your own execution?
The food turns to ash in your mouth, somehow sticking in your throat. You can't enjoy your last meal on earth, not armed with the knowledge of your iminent death.
And then you at last walking the walk of death, with no hope, no-one to turn to.
Let me tell you, there are no heroric last thoughts, no deep and meaningfull last words, just a terrible mantra in your head 'if only if only'...your heart is pounding in your ears and all you can feel is sheer raw panic.

Go into Death Row, walk the walk of death, those fatal last steps that you know will be your last.

Then look me in the eye and tell me that this is justice.

An Apology of the Log

If I were a log..

Look around you, at the terror and torment and suffering.
You reap what you sow.

Because you're human, what right does that give you to lord above all else?
To assume in your egotistical mind, that you alone have a higher consciousness. That animals and plants can't feel can't think.

I'm a log. And I feel vindicated.

We have done our fair share of wrongs too, I will freely admit.

I rotted through and fell on your house.
The storm blew me down and I made sure to land where it would hurt you most.
My branch impaled you as you tripped.
My bark scratched you as you passed me by.
My roots caught your feet.
My trunk broke your arm when you were sawing through my trunk.
I killed you when I fell.

I'm now an innocuous log, rotting on the forest floor, well sorry for my wrongs.

I'm sorry I caught you,
I'm sorry I hurt you,
I'm sorry I killed you.

But am I the sole perpetrator? The rebel without a cause?

I cried as you cut my brothers down.
I pleaded to deaf ears as my branches were hacked off.
I watched in silence as I was hewn and used so carelessly, burnt.
When my roots were torn up and I bled.
When I screamed as you hacked so viciously into my body.
When I died as you cut me down.

Shouldn't you be sorry too?

Libraries

Today I discovered that libraries are vacuums.
No don't look at me strangely, it happens to be true. The outside world is busy with bustling people, the noise, the movement, the rush.
When you walk into the library, it's like you enter another world. It's cool in summer, warm in winter; you enter to be greeted by sweet silence, not the utter stillness of a tomb, but the soft wirr of air conditiong, the sound of pages being turned. Footsteps are muffled by soft carpet, the sound of voices has been leached from the very air.
No clock tolls out the seconds, no voices telling you there's someplace you should be.
It is a vacuum from sound and time and reality.
You can sit and lose yourself in an endless number of worlds without feeling the passing of time.
One could grow old in a library and never notice, instead you can hide in the books and their pages, hide in the shadows of day, and forget.

One could go mad and never notice.

A 'Friendly Reminder'

They puzzle me.
Friendly reminders I mean.
If someone sends you an email, and the first words are 'just a friendly reminder..' you should delete it, it doesn't deserve to be read.
Have they even thought about what they are writing? How could a reminder to attend an upcoming sports event or a work meeting be unfriendly? Do people send threatning and heinous reminders of things?
I just imagine it now; 'this is the voice of doom speaking...to give a threatning reminder to attend the special meeting at church on thursday night otherwise many unfriendly things will happen indeed...'
I kindof think the word friendly is superflous here. The only reason your reminding them is because, a. you're a nice person, b. you are desperate for people to attend whatever the reminder is about (in this case, please go find some friends) or c. its a barbed email, a veiled threat to someone who never attends and needs to, in this case, it most certainly isn't a friendly reminder and that seems uncannily like a lie to say it is.
So whichever way you look at it, friendly reminders are defunct. (I have this bad feeling i just made that word up)
Please please never write one.

Anyway, just thought I'd share that gem of wisdom as a friendly reminder to everyone.

Sigh.

Pensiveness on the Bus

The thing about buses is they're misleading. You wait at a bustop in the pouring rain or the sweltering sun, it's always late, and takes forever to get to your chosen destination.
But the thing is, buses are amazing.
I reached this epiphany today as i sat in the suprisingly comfortable blue seat, my knees pushed up against the back of the seat in front of me, head comfortably back on the lovely cushioned headrests, the bus was almost empty (a youth reading the paper and an old woman) and I was staring out the window with Mick-Jagger's haunting voice playing Angie in my ears as I clutched my ipod with absentminded fingers. The moving bus is a suprisingly lulling sensation and i found myself with my eyes drifting shut, and that's when I realised I hadn't been so relaxed and happy in a while, I was literally grinning out the window into nothing, and that was the moment of realisation that buses were in fact, my vice.
You can relex and time out, not worry about what's happening in the future, just concentrate on everything all around you, and be happy.
I think everyone should take the bus, I spend half my life on the things, and I haven't turned out too bad. In small doses they actually help you, they give you time to think, and in our lives, so dictated by time, that is a very unusual and good thing.
so appreciate the small things in life, because its all the little things like bus rides that make the world the amazing place it is today.