Used up, finished with, and obsolete.
Why, then, am I such an obstruction?
Copyright owned by Jay Cool, June 2019
Obliteration: An Elegy
Barely literate, and not rated, Trump
lit his own fuse, turned red, and reiterated his desire
to obliterate a whole country.
Being rational, and not rationed, the ralliers
lit several fuses, turned to face the blighter, and reiterated
a shared desire to obliterate the whole of
the irrational.
And they did so –
literally.
Copyright owned by Jay Cool, June 2019
Retromingent
There was a fine man (he was such a gent!),
whose smiles at his boss were not truly meant!
Bitter, he was, with good reason to vent,
So, with piss in his pistol, he shot back as
<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<=============he went!
Copyright owned by Jay Cool, June 2019
Image by Peggy und Marco Lachmann-Anke from Pixabay
P.S. Click here for a definition of retromingent!
Read more silly poems:
Bummer: A Silly Poem
Leaden and bumbling, he stumbled and bled.
Oh bummer, he mumbled, my bum is so numb –
it would have been better to land on my tum!
At this, his tum grumbled – it wanted some bread –
though fat and well-rounded and recently fed.
He tried to roll over – to get off his bum,
but, finding it rooted, he called for his mum.
His mum, she walked past him, befuddled on rum,
and poor man, he lay there, until he was dead!
In time, where he’d fallen, the ground was his bed.
Next, in that same spot, grew a tree – plump and red!
Copyright of poem owned by Jay Cool, June 2019
Image by Hans Braxmeier from Pixabay.
Please see other posts, relating to trees, by Jay Cool:
Savvy Book – The Hidden Life of Trees
Just finished worming my way through the maze of hidden wonders that constitutes Peter Wohlleben’s savvy bestseller: The Hidden Life of Trees. It’s taken me some weeks to get to the middle of it and back out again to where I started, by which, I’m not implying that it was a dull ride – far from it! This is a book to savour – to be chewed through slowly, bit by bit, being sure to miss nothing!
For several weeks, I have fed upon this book; it has been everywhere with me! Everytime I have set foot outside my cave, I’ve been in the company of Wohlleben’s words. Every time I’ve had a minute to spare, I’ve sat down and absorbed another two or three pages. And the rest of the time? The rest of the time, I’ve been bouncing around my hometown, and the villages beyond (sometimes, even as far afield as Shropshire) examining roots and tree trunks. Just take a look at these beauties!
I’ve captured trees under attack from all kinds of beasts and man (i.e. all beasts). Trees with their bark peeled off, their tops lopped off, their insides consumed, arms twisted, and skin infected.
And, on in every paragraph of the savviest book about trees of all time, I’ve seen analogies between all things woody and all things weird and wonky – my smile, for example!
Take this quote, with reference to beech trees: ‘Apparently, the trees synchronise their performance so that they all equally successful.’ (p.15) The total antithesis of the modern workplace, in which the self-promoted stretch out their executive branches to starve the meek of any sunlight!
Full of my own sense of wellness, after a woody walk and a read, I had every intention of bounding into my office, on the next workday, to suggest to the boss that he send the whole staff to a German forest for a team-building-log-cabin residential course. The beech trees, with Peter as translator, would do a splendid job of leading the sessions.
Fortunately, on turning to the next page, I read that ‘Huddling together is desirable’ (p.16), and had a change of plan! ‘Huddling’ in close proximity to my colleagues being, in my view, totally undesirable! And huddling with the boss? No, no, no! Absolutely not! If a storm’s brewing, I’m keeping my distance!
In the end, I concluded that it might be a safer bet to use some of the analogies in my stories and poems. Hence, during the course of reading the book, in empathy with trees who suffer when their bark is picked off by no-gooders, I knocked out what I thought was a work of fictional genius, and sent this short story off to a publisher – it was rejected! What cheek! Luckily, you, my SSSS** readers are a lot more discerning, and recognise the good stuff when you see it. So, here it is: Quantum Coupling: A Short Story.
Now that you have read ‘Quantum Coupling’ (i.e. go back and read all of it), I will leave you with Wohlleben’s concluding sentences:
‘And who knows, perhaps one day the language of trees will eventually be deciphered, giving us the raw material for further amazing stories. Until then, when you take your next walk in the forest, give free rein to your imagination – in many case, what you imagine is not far removed from reality, after all!’ (p.245)
Get real! Get savvy! And get reading!
Copyright of book review, the associated short story and all photographs, owned by Jay Cool, June 2019
** Reference to The Silly-Savvy Salopian in Suffolk, i.e. SSSS.
Please read more book reviews by Jay Cool:
This is Going to Hurt: Book Review
Quantum Coupling: A Short Story
Disclaimer: The images at the foot of this post link to Amazon. Should you choose to make a purchase, I will receive a commission at no extra cost to yourself.
She’s angry. Angry with herself and angry with her mother. Angry with the trees that are her home – her family. Penknife in hand, Roots inserts the point, touches the core, and chips off the first piece of bark. Chips off the skin.
“I needed to do this,” her mother had told her. “Needed to be here, here in the woods; needed to return to my roots, to own a little piece of this land for myself. A little piece of nature to call my own. You understand; I know you do. You are part of this land, part of this wood; you were born here, here under this tree, in the home that I made – made for us both.”
But she knows that this isn’t true. Knows that her mother was only thinking of herself when she chose to give birth in a wood; chose to bring up her child in an abandoned log cabin. Chose to raise her only child, her daughter, on a diet of wild fungi, roots and berries.
“Feral!” the teacher had whispered to a colleague. “Raised in the woods by a hippy. By a crackpot! Hair matted into dreadlocks, as thick and as rough as the bark of a tree – probably riddled with woodworm!”
She guesses she wasn’t meant to have heard these comments, this first summing up of her appearance by an outsider but, like the trees that cradled her into life, her hearing is exceptionally sharp.
“And what kind of a mother would name a child Roots? It’s asking for trouble!”
First day at school, Roots is years older than the other kids, and she sticks out like a thickened-old oak tree surrounded by saplings.
“She’s a Faraway Tree!”declared the class starlet; the self-appointed child genius who’d read all her parents’ books, front to back, over and over, before she’d barely even started nursery school. “She lives in the Magic Faraway Tree, with Moonface and Silky! Eat one of her pop biscuits and you can make a wish upon her dreadlocks!”*
“Yuck, I’m not eating anything she’s made!” declared the communal others, all in one voice, with one mind, with one mind controlled by the starlet. “She’s dirty. She’s disgusting. Never washes her hair. Doesn’t have a bath. Probably washes her hands in deer poo!”
She’s angry. Inserts the edge of the knife further in and under the bark of the tree. Chips off another piece of bark. Another piece of skin.
“Oops, didn’t see you there!” screams out the girl who’s just fallen into her, knocked her off balance, and left her on the concrete. Left her to right herself, to re-root her behind onto the wooden playground bench. “Thought you were part of the bench! Sorry!” she laughs in chorus with her identical friends. And they all run off, feet in time, like army recruits, all working as one. All following orders.
She turns again to her companion behind her, the one single tree in a concrete landscape, retrieves her penknife. Chips off the bark. It’s looking good, she thinks. Looks like a leg with a scrape on it, a graze. A leg with an injury, ready to be patched up. Ready for a plaster. She chips off some more.
Every break-time, from then on, she works hard at the task. Chipping away, bit by bit, peeling away the skin, preparing the leg for its day of binding, wondering about how she’ll get hold of the bandage, soon to be required. Chipping away, on and on, through the Autumn term, through the Spring, and on through the Summer, until …
September.
The new teacher’s unhappy; her face resembles the terrifying facial features of a trucker’s cab. Headlight-eyes smeared and unfocused, grille-lips, frowning and threatened.
“I don’t understand it!” she rants. “Just don’t understand it. Don’t get it at all. During the summer holidays something shocking happened, and it happened right here, in this school, in our playground!”
“What did, Miss?” shouts out the starlet, a little taller, but otherwise unchanged. Unchanged and still controlling.”What happened, Miss?”
“Someone. Someone horrible. Someone evil, mindless and unthinking committed a grave act of vandalism!”
“Is it the graffiti on the bench, Miss?” contributes one of the followers.
“Silence! Silence and listen! Let me finish!”
The silence is deafening, as deafening as the rustle of leaves, when woodland trees know that a storm is imminent.
“Someone, someone, stole the life from our school tree. From the one tree, that has been here since the school first opened, the Mayor’s oak tree, rooted and watered with his own hand, at our opening ceremony – twenty-five years ago! Our pride and joy!”
“What happened, Miss? Has it gone, Miss? Is it dead? What’s wrong with it?”
“Silence, I told you! Don’t interrupt!”
“Someone, someone, took a knife and stripped our tree of it’s bark, took away ring of bark from all the way around it’s trunk! And do you know what happens, when a tree is stripped of it’s bark, of it’s skin?”
“Yes, Miss ..it ..”
“Silence! Silence I told you! When a tree is stripped of its bark, it can no longer get access to essential nutrients, can no longer feed, can no longer live!”
“But, ..”
“Be quiet, I told you! What I would like to do is to get hold of that person, the person who did that, to get hold of them, to get their leg and to peel off a layer of their skin, all the way around their calf, all the way around to their shin and back!”
“Yuck, I feel sick, Miss!”
“Silence, girl! Yes, that is what I would like to do to them. See how they would like it.”
The class, communally, as one, fall silent.
“Miss?” interjects the starlet.
“What?”
“Miss, where’s Roots today? Is she not coming back this year? Has she left?”
“No idea and, if I did, I wouldn’t discuss it with you. Silence. Get on with your work!”
“I know where she is!” blurts out one of the followers, one of the many. “My mum says that she’s in hospital. Had an accident during the summer holiday. A very serious leg injury.”
A ripple of colour rumbles around the class – pinks up the faces of the followers. The teacher, troubled – troubled and angry – turns white.
“Silence, I told you! Get on with your work!”
Hobbling out of the hospital, she clutches hold of her crutches; clutches hold of the dead wood of willow tree, with her hands still living; living hands that give off a little heat, enough perhaps to coax a willow back into life. She pauses, long enough to take a swig from her water bottle, long enough to start again. Her leg is painful – it’ll take some time for the skin graft to acclimatise to it’s host. She thinks of last year’s perch, the lonely wooden bench, next to the lonely ash tree.
It’ll be some time before Roots has to return to school.
In the meantime, anything could happen.
Copyright owned by Jay Cool, June 2019
Image of log cabin by skeeze from Pixabay
Disclaimer: The images below link to Amazon. Should you choose to make a purchase, I will receive a commission at no extra cost to yourself.
*Reference to Enid Blyton’s ‘The Enchanted Wood’, ‘The Magic Faraway Tree’ and ‘The Magic Faraway Tree Again’ fiction series.
Inspiration taken from ‘The Hidden Life of Trees’ by Peter Wohlleben:
Resignation: A Something Poem
The stew being stagnant,
I swim to the edge of the pot,
reach up to rim and pull
myself out.
The others, resigned to the stupor,
stay.
Copyright owned by Jay Cool, June 2019
Image by LoggaWiggler from Pixabay
Spectacle: A Something Poem
Is wearing spectacles a sign that the wearer is a watcher;
an observer of all things sporty and sporting?
Or does one, when donning specs, become the sport,
no longer a human being, but an entertainment,
an energising figment of an overactive imagination?
Copyright of poem owned by Jay Cool, June 2019
Other posts by Jay Cool:
Getting Out of The Day Job 37: Lippy
Day 5.1: Prioress Cool of Wenlock
Volition: A Savvy Poem
Being volatile, my spark evolves into a raging bonfire –
flames, red-hot and amber, against bubbles of calming green.
The Devolution of Man: As women have evolved, have men devolved?
Pleased to be notified of a new follower, and knowing that ‘one good turn deserves another’, I, in turn, click through to the good man’s website.
The first post I come across offers words of profound advice to errant women. In summary:
Women should take a look at themselves in the mirror, the author instructs, before moaning about their heartbreak at the loss of a boyfriend. Were they a little slimmer, when the ex first fell in lust with them? Is it time to shed a few pounds? Have they changed the way they dress? If so, then they must, once again, dress in the fashions that first caught the attention of their true love. And horror of all horrors, have they been embarrassing themselves by playing the chaser?
It is, the reader is informed, the man’s role to do the hunting. The dumped girlfriend must: recreate her younger, slimmer and more attractively dressed and hair-styled self. Then all that she will need to do to win her man back, is to sit still, looking pretty – and wait!
To resummarise, then this is what I believe the good man is trying to convey to his lady reader:
You, my good lady, have moved on. You have evolved to become something that is mature, sophisticated, well-rounded and perceptive.
I envy you.
I, being a man, have regressed to being something less than even the boy I once was. In short, then I do not have much time left; the rapidity of the devolution process for me, a mere man, means that – very shortly – I will disappear from sight altogether. I hope that my Mother’s womb is ready to receive me, as I crawl back into the space in which I was nurtured.
Dear Mother,
It is time for me to repay my debt to you. As I shrink inside you, I will be reabsorbed into your body, and will henceforward provide the sustenance to keep you moving forwards for perpetuity.
But, for me, dear Mother – this the end.
Your devoted son. XXX
As man ends, woman continues.
And this, in Jay Cool’s world, is evolution!
Copyright owned by Jay Cool, a middle-aged lady who is proud to announce that she can no longer squeeze into a pair of Size 12 denim shorts from Sainsbury’s, but a tad less-proud to announce that neither could she fit into a Size 14. And no, Jay Cool did not return to the display rails to collect a Size 16 – she no longer shops at Sainsbury’s! If Sainsbury’s still wants Jay Cool, it will have to do the chasing!
The Silly-Savvy Salopian in Suffolk: read, believe and write ... 