A fight broke out between
the hemispheres of my brain.
Like two bickering brothers,
they baited each other over weak spots
known to each since the spark of creation.
“Too old,” goaded the Right.
“Too slow,” said the Left
releasing the inhibiting agent.
“…too…mean,”
said Righty
a bit after
the battle
was lost.
The housewife rises to her full five-four and
helicopters her rally towel.
“Make my life have meaning,” she screams at the home team.
“Bring joy to the void.”
Her husband secures his BigBeer in its cup holder and He brings himself to his feet as well
but with less urgency.
He puts both hands to his face,
cupped into a megaphone.
“Nepenthe,” he bellows
like the name of the relief pitcher.
And again.
“Nepenthe!”
long and hollow.
Today, in the hot house,
I said “Thank you” to a spider.
She folded two legs across her chest
and tapped the toes of two others.
I said “Thank you” to a spider
and I specified her work
in the hot house,
though I did not mean it
as a loophole, specifically.
I said “Thank you” to a spider
and the fingernail-clicking
of her voice chittered,
“‘Bout damn time.”
I recently joined a FaceBook group called “Haiku for a global pandemic.” Once or twice a day I drop a haiku in that group. I’m going to keep a little collection of them here as well. I’m sure mostly they will be my own, but I’ll put up ones I like with author’s permission. This will be a growing collection through this period of isolation.
4/13/20
Cold Michigan wind
the morning after Easter,
trails strands of somber.
–Steve D. Marsh
4/10/20
My highest highlight:
The most yellow daffodils
Telling Death to wait.
–Steve D. Marsh
See, the thing is, Weird Al said not to do this and I’m not even the first. But here’s my version…and a link to the original. But feel free to sing along with my lyrics below. Very 13 year old boy brain stuff.
UPDATE: Friend, Ken Cormier, honored me with this: Please listen.
Oh my little bitty one, bitty bug.
Are you gonna live in some grime, Corona?
Ooh, you make my sneezer run, my sneezer run.
Blow a Kleenex full of slime, Corona
Never gonna stop, give it up.
Such a dirty hand. Always get it up for the touch
of the viral kind. My my my i yi woo.
M M M My Corona
Come a little closer, huh, ah will ya, huh.
Close enough to sneeze in my eyes, Corona.
Keeping you so far away gets to me
Licking down the length my fries, Corona.
Never gonna stop, give it up. Such a dirty hand.
Always get it up for the touch
of the virus guys. My my my i yi woo.
M M M My Corona
M M M My Corona
When you gonna give it to me, give it to me?
It is just a matter of time, Corona
?
Is it just destiny, destiny?
Or is it just a game in my mind, Corona?
Never gonna stop, give it up.
Such a dirty hand. Always get it up for the touch
of the viral kind. My my my i yi woo.
My my my i yi woo.
M M M My Corona
M M M My Corona
M M M My Corona
M M M My Corona
(Apologies to The Knack)
The otter floats, playfully aware,
on the currents and the tides.
She dives to examine
an interesting stone.
She turns it every way
in the sunshine,
floating on her back.
She flips it away
and finds another.
It, too, is interesting,
turned in the air,
maybe for the first time in a thousand years
or, perhaps, since last week.
It smells of the water.
It slips away.
She does not keep the interesting stones.
They would weigh her down.
She would drown in her sleep.
She darts to the bottom.
She pries a fish from a crevice
and returns to the surface current,
always floating on her back,
enjoying her lunch.
Sometimes she spies a clam.
She also finds the right anvil stone and,
again floating on her back in the currents,
beats the clam on the stone
she balances on her stomach.
It is primal and
it is dinner.
She releases the clam shell and the stone.
One plunges to the bottom.
The other rocks back and forth in descent.
Tomorrow:
different stones,
different clams.
Sent a crocodile to Washington.
They sent that croc back to me.
They said, he can’t get along with anyone.
Sadly, that’s a fact, although he’s a she.
I should have sent my alligator
To chew through the hullabaloo,
‘Cuz a crock just hasn’t a clue
What a real live swampy gator can do.
So I sent them back a gator,
A big ol’ boy to boot.
Made him carry a crock-skin briefcase
While wearing a shark skin suit.
He was supposed to take your retirement
And turn it into a fortune.
Instead he pocketed the cash
And landed a round house on your chin.
He sold us out for a private island
And a cabana made of bamboo.
Turns out a man just hasn’t a clue
What a real live swampy gator will do.
So I just stay out of Washington now.
The dialogue’s been getting hotter.
Some say its the death of civility.
I think it’s something in the water.
Sometimes the window opens for a second,
or a split-second.
We catch one glimpse of a past
when we were ignorant,
or spoiled,
or depraved.
For an instant,
as through a camera shutter,
the long march of our life
glints in silvery backlight
and we fall into awareness
(but not consciousness)
of who we are
what we are
what we were.
The shutter clicks,
the window closes
and we know only that we have seen something
true and real
but have no “this-world” reference
to a vision of light so pure
it might be x-rays.
There is no video record,
no text,
no bas relief,
no Daguerreotype.
It remains in ephemeral memory
if we nurture it.
Of course, we can opt for sleep
and let it pass.
Go on, little poem;
Go down the hill and get in line
With the others.
There are hundreds of you now
Trying to stand as tall and straight as soldiers
Holding fixed bayonets at the ready.
But most of you are small,
Bent little things,
Like a long rank of twisted teeth
Standing stubbornly in your sockets.
You are barely strong enough to stand
And give testimony
To how someone once lived
And raised you
In all your misshapen fortitude.
But, go on;
Go get in line,
Like old-time farmers
Leaning on long handled hay forks,
Gossiping at market.
You tell them
After I’ve gone.
Show them my crooked scowl,
My bent grin.
Stand, like strikers, holding aloft
Your placards and slogans.
Stand against the bullies and braggarts,
The privileged and the aloof.
Stand in line after I have lain down
And make a good bit of noise.
When morphine slowed and thickened
my Dad’s voice,
he told anyone who would listen
about the bee colony
in his hospice room.
Back and forth,
they flew.
He said in his dry, dying-man voice,
“I think they are moving
from one place to another.”
Dad, deep in glaucoma,
without his glasses,
high as he ever had been in life,
watched bees
go back and forth
building,
while he was dying.
Two days before his death, Dad,
who was vain about his voice,
who some would say was vainglorious about talking,
who was not a conversationalist so much as
one who didn’t know when to listen,
used the last of his voice
to castigate my sister,
for a mass of imagined insults and disappointments
over a malignant lifetime.
She left in tears and vowed never to return.
Something sacred had broken
and it couldn’t be healed over
or sealed up, at least not in time.
The golden honey of her daughter’s love
had drained out
and was lost upon the ground.
When he finished,
and she had left,
the cancer took his voice.
And still he watched the bees coming and going,
tearing down and building;
he signed to me
to bring my sister back to him
that he might make amends.
I did not know how to trust him either.
Bees make honey
but bees have stingers.
And when they sting, they die.
For two days,
I went back and forth
to bring my sister back to my father’s death bed
And when she consented,
with steel in her voice,
and steel in her backbone,
and steel in her jaw,
I promised I would be with her.
He took her warmth in both of his paper-dry cool hands
And clutched her hand to his thin chest
near his heart.
He looked at her face and moved his rough lips
and though he was no longer taking water,
tears squeezed out of the corners of his eyes
and rolled backward
across his ears
onto the smooth hospice pillowcase.
That night, he moved on–
no more back and forth.
Five years later, my sister thanked me
for being tough with her
and for insisting,
although I don’t remember it
exactly like that.