I sort of started this whirl in the morning over a nice cup of tea and it went nowhere. But then got on with my day of errands and running around and by the time I got back to it, it was late afternoon and Chloe said, “mom, it’d be nice to have a fire tonight.” and then that was that, the whirl became all about the fire.

How does that happen? Thank you to Brenda for the manageable words this week.

habits, create, however, virtue, regard, gap,
cycle, undoing, lessen, choice, gathering, suffering

You regard the virtue inside the cardboard rectangle that fits in so nicely in your hand.
Smooth edges turning between your fingertips, sandpaper rough against the soft parts of your palm, inside holding torches, slides in and out and in and out, its one function: to light your fire

Lessen the load by one wooden stick. That familiar cycle, strike and spark, ignite, flicker, flame, burn.

Smell of sulphur, of smoke, of late nights in a cabin full of candle shine, gathering twigs and pine cones that sizzle and pop.

Of nights in the ashtray of a hotel bar. Of stick after stick, smoke after smoke blending in the hazy grey.

Of habits in pockets, creates excuses for names and numbers, lives in the junk drawer in your house, measures your choice and suffering, lets you know where you’ve been, where you might go again.

A carbon copy waiting inside the chamber holding fire, sliding in and out and in and out, now it appears in your hand to strike, split-second gap, then ignite and burn, sizzle, pop, hiss, choke, sulphur smoke.

Do it again

However, that is your undoing.

Not that Chloe and I don’t have enough Starbucks around here, we drove the seven minutes away to our old hood to hang out at the Sbux up there to have the very same Earl Gray tea I can make here at home for the price of a tea bag, which is much less than the $2 Sbux price. What’s that all about? And then we watched the lovely people stop by to get their own drinks for 17 times the price of the home brewed.

I was reading the Sunday whirl words and thinking that we’ve all got an addiction to coffee shops, to coffee, a psychosis, and so I let the whirl spiral right down into the dark roasted bitterness of it all.

buckle, gain, miss, instant, navigate, grace
visions, humming, drill, dignity, years, stride

Coffee is really a dominant force in her life right now. It has been for years. It’s a sad thing, but there it is. She takes it in her stride… it’s a city thing.

She likes to stop for coffee on her way, pay her money and hand over a crisp, white Styrofoam cup. She likes the way it looks. The boy behind the coffee bar looks up and smiles; he knows the drill.

Sometimes she has a latte, sometimes an Americano, she never misses a day. She thinks about that time, thousands of years from now, when she and this country will be known for the things left for future generations: Styrofoam cups, plastic bottles; things which may buckle with age but not decay. She is holding in her hand molecules which will outlive her body. Thousands of years of existence for an afternoon coffee finished in ten minutes…in an instant.

No, it can never be instant. That was left behind a long time ago along with her memories of her mother, fat and nervous. How her hands shook as she pulled the wet linens out of the washing machine.
She snapped the sheet open, folded it and put it in the laundry basket, wet, folded, but wet.
Washer woman, lacking grace or dignity, navigating children and chickens, humming her way down the clothesline in the yard.

She blinks away the frown. She smiles at the Styrofoam cups covering every square foot of her living room, each an organic reminder of the day before. She looks at the clean white order of her days.
Someday urban archaeologists will excavate her home and find a large cache of these things, lovingly organised and ready for study. Oh what a gain for science, how glorious that will be.

She picks up the magic marker and writes 09,10,2013 (thought of mom)
She walks over to the window ledge positioning it carefully next to 09,09,2013 (bought new cups)

Lovely Sunday Whirl words.

When I read them, I got a glimpse of falling stars and so went with the feeling.

A little fantasy/nonsense/whimsy then.

chance, nest, secret, clever, swept, ripe,
blinked, stars, basket, flesh, saw, hand

We grab blankets to steel ourselves against the icy bite of the night air.
We tiptoe across the lawn to sit on the swinging chair under the trees as stars fall down like ripe plums around us.
We pluck them from their grassy nest to cart them home when we have found our fill.

I lay them out across my open hand to feel their weight before I place each one in our basket, then bend to gently sweep another free; for pull too hard and break their backs.
I hold each of the stars up in the glare of the moon hoping she’ll tell me which one holds a secret, or at least a clever clue, in the chance hint of moon beams, the magical, deceitful light.

You fear the ancient superstitions.
You say we shouldn’t let fallen stars see the moon or they will forever long to join her floating far above, forever calling, forever whispering her name in your ear.
You don’t realise that lying there in my hand they can’t call the moon, only feel her aching pull.

Each time I hold a star in my hand I long to see its light, feel its weight, let it warm my flesh.
But you are right. Each star that saw the moon blinked forever out of reach.
And the moon is distant, smiling, lost in her own perfect world, impervious to our anguish, calling us to where she knows we can never go.

My hands are cold. Cherry burning, huckleberry bright and cold.

I try to make a habit of the Sunday whirl and believe me when I say I always have the intention to write and, most Saturdays, even begin the poem at some point. Then get half way and run out of time and, before I know it, it’s Thursday! And then I read thru my fellow whordlers and they all have brilliant whirls up on their blogs.

Must try harder!

Started this whirl yesterday and, while I know it’s not quite October yet, we have been fighting off the sniffles with mega-doses of vitamin C and quite a few of our friends are down with something nasty. It’s the season, isn’t it?

So here is my Sunday whirl for this week and hooray for restful, lazy, rainy Sundays.

ghosts, exact, patches, gathered, worship, spill
unbidden, hillside, where, swarm, edges, sharp

You may worship the romance of early evening walks wrapped up in softest wool sweaters, glancing in windows lit by the golden light of open fires, crunchy leaves gathered in backyard piles, and crisp autumn air, but let me tell you the hardest truths from the softest wools, oh foolish friend.

October has returned. An unwelcomed guest. It’s always wise to count the silver after October visits.

This light-fingered month has a sunny smile that lifts your spirits and makes you think you’re just lightly chilled when you take to your bike one last time and happily coast down the hillside, sends a sizzling slap to your cheeks, and ends with nights that leave you wondering why you bothered to try to sleep in the first place.

The inside of your head swims like the patchy ribbons of an oil spill, where you shiver into your pillow with the low grade fever and scratchy throat that lasts for eternal short, sharp, grey days, punctuating restless ghost-filled, nightmare-plagued darkness as you pile on the blankets.

And if ghosts are made of particles and if they blow like shadows thru the centuries, then so does this dreadful month, that assumes a personality and exacts its toll just to disappear again till next season, when it swarms back into your home, unbidden.

To push you to the edges, like a gaggle of bored housewives complaining about bad manicures in French accents.

(Art: Mixed media collage with acrylic, paper cut-outs, and various pieces from an old computer.)

Yesterday I felt headachy and blah when I started writing the Sunday Whirl. I finished it this morning and this morning I feel much, much better, but I thought that this poem was honest and still felt right so I didn’t rewrite it. I finished it and let it stand.

pay, stains, center, bell, dimension, intrigue,
magic, only, used, avenue, answer, change

They say the best way to survive an avalanche is to swim like hell, to go with the flow or you’ll pay for it, but I’ve spent several hours going with the flow and I feel myself sinking like lead.
My head is spinning.
It might be the air, it might be the water, it might be the fact that I haven’t been back long enough to actually realise the mountains aren’t cardboard cut-outs and I can’t knock them over to smash the whole city flat, change avenue to field.

Concentrate on shadow’s circle, sunny center.
See a million leaves worship simple, becoming gold in their skin.
Simplicity in yellowing, falling, swinging down to the path, another dimension of life, age spots, brown stains fraying around the edges.

There is no right answer, no magic solution. I’m used to it.
Leaning into the headache leads nowhere so I grab some water.
Each cupped life coming in handfuls in the chop of late afternoon glare.
A dog scrabbles after a ball, scraping and scratching his nails on the path, his tags tinkling bell, then crash cymbal then only bell until he turns back.
My nails leave little half-moon marks on my wrist.

Thinking is muddy, a muddy path and the splash of a step, intrigue in the spot of sun cooking rain from the ferns.
Green ferns patient in their green, green with dna that once saw the dinosaurs stomp thru the muggy humidity.
Brontosaur of a headache.
Stegosaur, stegosaur with crash cymbals.
Splash
AND THERE the poem flops down exhausted, grateful, wishing for the headache to stomp away just to lie in the sun on the rug.

Fancy that, darling.

It’s Sunday morning and the birdsong has chased away the dark of the night, so I suppose it’s safe to bring you a darker whirl, since the sun is out and we’re all feeling safe and cozy with our tea and breakfast in our bed.

vault, halls, swirl, crave, throat, wind,
limbs, nimble, prairie, rapture, train, each

‘Listen to me’, she said in a raspy voice, dusty and torn on that street corner as she stopped us on our walk.

‘There was a day on Earth when nothing died,’ she said, ‘and Death was pacing the black halls of his black heart with nothing to do and a craving he could not explain.

But rather than give in, he drew his scythe from his vault and ascended above the world, above the prairie, the forest, the mountain and past Earth’s borders to do some astral tidying up.

All day he nimbly swung his scythe. The swirl of silver steel cut thru the wind, the cold, the dark, and life string after life string was cut free sending the stars tumbling thru the celestial blue till his limbs felt weak and his scythe was beginning to dull.

And hundreds of lovers stared up at the sky holding hands and kissing and counting their blessings that night as a steady train of shooting stars fell down, tangling in trees or landing in back yard sand boxes.

But when Death stopped to mop his brow he realised that the stars shine so brightly in their desperate state to deceive Death of their dying, and now there were only a few stars left fighting off the dark of the night.

Then the next day and for years afterwards he had double the work as heart after heart broke at the sight of a starless sky.’

She stopped speaking and released her hold and she stared at each of us; our eyes wide open in rapture.

Then she looked away thru tears and swallowed hard, as though there was a lump in the back of her throat.

These were interesting words, or maybe I’ve been in a funny mood. I couldn’t come up with anything romantic out of them even with the words heart and close. All I could keep thinking about was marketing. Oh well, went with the flow.

I took this image at West Cottage in the industrial estate a year or so ago and it seems to fit the feeling of this poem.

beam, anchor, shift, close, heart, phrase,
range, connect, current, fertile, layers, yield

I am aspiring to the current position of rebellious cult genius of influence.

I think the honour I strive for is waiting for me somewhere up there on this broken-rung ladder.

So I’ve fallen a few times but I always bounce, always repeat, it’s the plush layers of my skin.

I wouldn’t want to whisper the truth of my boredom from the bottom anyway; I want to shout like a firecracker at the heart of a party.

Don’t talk to me of a sudden shift or my imagination will falter and yield to the fear that this happened here already just a close while ago.

For now just pace back and forth and back and forth on the floor of the office; my mouth tasting of floor, my brains crammed with floor, the flavour of my movements, floor.

You know, my impeccable spirit beams with a meat-hook reality, but perhaps no one will notice.

Being a charming, out of touch, rebellious cult genius of influence was easy in previous decades.

Now, I drag those decades behind me like an anchor.

Now it’s like struggling to grab water and drag it back to the shore.

But I only need one phrase to connect, to allow everything to make sense like it always does.

My boring complaint is that every fertile position has already been taken up and championed into depths of crumpled worthlessness.

Until some charming idealist comes along and smoothes out its broken, wrinkled form and contrives it into an endless range of product placement and domestic penetration.

And on any given Saturday I can go buy rebellion at the department store.

In plastic of course, but a relatively good imitations.