Performance

His light and spacious store-front
office presents as a peculiar place
of professional business. Behind the
reception desk, a soft-spoken young man
adept at putting clients at ease, at the
preliminary ministrations of technical
gear, conducting retinal scans,
meticulously completing paperwork.

The ceiling in the large reception area
festooned with model planes, dirigibles,
colourful miniature hot-air balloons.
Clocks in every conceivable shape: octagonal,
wags-on-the-wall, regulators, bracket,
gingerbread, talk and tick the minutes of
waiting time, chiming Westminster hours.
Interspersed, an array of gilt and silver
mirrors of every conceivable size, shape.

People are seated, awaiting appointments,
on petit-point and leather, wood-carved
and rattan-embellished, antique dentist
armchairs and more, selecting from
among colour-plated tomes on Egyptology,
space travel, cosmology, flora and fauna of
the world, gardening whimsies and aquaria
as reading-and-ogling material. The office
clearly appointed by someone with a flaming
sense of humour, refusing to take life too
lightly, nor too seriously, but just so.

Reflecting, in fact, the physical flamboyance
and tangential mind-tics of their host, the
irrepressible Doctor Brown, Eyedoctor.ca
who eventually reveals himself as a study in
casual delusional self-awareness; tall and
gangly, slicked-back hair, high, gaunt cheekbones
and gravelly, sombre voice revealing the
high-tension-wire act of a circus performer.
To whose ministrations patients entrust
their health, humour and vision.

Pensively Anticipating

Red sky at night, observers delight.
This flaming vision does not reflect
but as a late summer sky with
daylight hours waning, autumn
stealthily on the prowl, overtaking
humid, lazy, hazy summer nights;
much too, much too unhappily soon.

Nothing short of dismaying, that
we cannot forbid nature from her
immutable routine, the sun occupying
a different place in the heavens and
we in the northern latitudes have no
choice but to loosen our mind's
grip on our short, elusive summer.

In the garden, flowers still bloom,
fewer in display, wan where they
were once gregariously, ebulliently gay.
The goldfinches and hummingbirds
preparing for their long, diurnal
southward flight leaving a gap of
regret among those who remain.

Shorter days begin to gather into
mournful plenitude, the tired garden
left to rest under a blanket of snow,
our world transformed from brilliant
colour to frigid pellucid skies, churning
winds and bone-cracking icy nights
of tediously prolonged duration.

Liberating Libya

Civil countries for whom democracy
and human rights are the gold standard
of relations between people and their
governments patronize the glorious idea
of assisting struggling populations of the
world to achieve their right to liberty
and equality as a birthright ideal.

Aligning themselves with the rebel
forces seeking to unseat their intolerable
inherited tyrant, NATO helpfully engages
in bombing and strafing the regime's
military might their own member
countries provided for sale to the
tyrant, their amenable, erstwhile ally.

The country becomes mired in blood,
mercenaries are well paid to do the
regime's bidding, millions of indigent
foreign workers are trapped, victimized,
targeted, desperately fleeing the carnage
that government troops and rebel
militias alike inflict upon themselves
and the country's hapless civilians.

The dictator, his enriched family, cronies
and allies along with his devoted military
finally routed, tribal antipathies expressing
the cultural mores of hatred and violence
are unleashed beyond disciplinary advice.
The champions of justice and people's
freedom look on in dismay as triumph they
aided to reality is expressed in candid
displays of brutish clan exuberance.

The rebels fire volleys into the air,
carelessly brandishing new weaponry
from unguarded depots to augment
their own. As rebels torch and loot and
destroy, illustrating the joy they take in
freedom - at long last - this reflects their
entitlements of victory as do the atrocities
they commit in their violent zeal to match
government forces. The punishment nicely
enabled and ferociously meted out.

The Summer-Weary Garden

The garden, our well-tempered companion
throughout the summer months, generously
offering up fragrance, drama, colour and
ongoing expectations in its humble way,
is beginning to exude the inevitable end-of-season
weariness. Its aerial visitors have become fewer
in number and delightful variety. Already,
at night, the garden hears their wings and
chirps signalling the southern migratory journey,
preparing to abandon it to cooler days and nights.

Late-summer bloomers like Japanese anemones,
Chinese lanterns, asters, turtleheads, third-wind
roses, purple loosestrife, black-eyed Susans
and coneflowers still glory the garden, but the
ornamental trees and shrubs are tumbling their
foliage in growth excess, longing for surcease and
the inevitable rest that winter allows them. Lawns
and borders are stiff with discarded cones, heavy
with pitch, and needles turning green grass to an
orange-overlaid resting coverlet, inviting frost.

Lucy - In The Sky - With Diamonds

At the Milky Way no less, a mere
4,000 light years from another
near constellation in the vast
nearness of the ineffable Firmament.
Imagine, a diamond planet, no less.
A spinning, brilliant pulsar of a
planet, pluckily challenging Jupiter,
one of our Solar System's giant
gaseous planets, for sheer mass.

But consider: polar opposites,
one comprised of overheated
insubstantially stolid gas, whereas
the other of high density carbon, a
splendid, sparkling diamond planet,
scintillating, tossing off plumes of
rainbow-refracted light. Lucy
is alertly agog, in hot pursuit of glitter.

Ask Me

Want my opinion? I'd be
only too willing to contrive
responses that may satisfy
and please your enquiry, for
you may have noted, I am eager
to please. Like almost everyone
else, I want to be liked, my
presence sought out, my
expressions appreciated. I
will not ruffle feathers by
introducing new ideas for I am
committed to accepting yours,
to give honour to your thoughts
and perceptions. I am
dedicated to the pursuit of
your kindly regard, determined
to present as your friend,
for, you know, your vote of
confidence in my promises
means much to me, at that
ultimate popularity contest
venue, the polling booth. So,
go ahead, do it; ask me.

From the Bedroom Overhead

When they were young
and always underfoot
they were encouraged
to entertain playmates
in their very own rooms.

All that noise, the
childish exuberance
their zest for life
made their parents
nervous and upset.

Now that the young
are grown and become
nubile, they entertain
playmates in those
very same rooms.

Upsetting their parents
making them nervous
straining to hear
some reassuring sound
from the bedroom overhead.