Some thoroughly pointless thoughts that I felt like posting, because it is a whimsical sort of night.

Here are signs that I am growing old before my time:

1. My metabolism is slowing. I have put on 5kg in the past 2 years, and I have a baby paunch. It sounds cuter than it looks.
2. My skin is becoming old and mottled -- all these unsightly creases and discolored tones.
3. I am developing strange, sickly symptoms. I am feeling strange aches all over my body, and I don't know where they are coming from. All I know is that they are not the result of intense exercise.
4. Working with the kids makes me feel young(er). And a little bit more sensible, I suppose.

I have found also that I enjoy debating too much for my own good. Debated the national team in an exhibition match today, and was utterly outclassed, but it was hell as fun. I desperately want to do it again, if only to prove I can get better (again, symptoms of premature ageism -- thinking "you still got it" when you don't). Makes me wonder why I don't feel so intensely excited about more important things in life.

Haven't written anything here for a while, because it is just very frustrating trying to find interesting things I am qualified to write about. Decided, eventually, that I am at least sufficiently qualified to write about the assorted going-ons in life. 

I have generally receded from Facebook and LJ, which I believe makes me a hermit. Of course, it is more than a little bit lamentable that our social health is so heavily defined by these faceless and artificial displays of online exhibitionism. But I suppose FB is, at least in my case, a good measure of just how much time I spend lolloping around at home. In the past 2 weeks, I have spent my time:

1. Watching Thierry Henry videos on loop.
2. Dubbing my own epic Australian-accented commentary over a video of Titi's wondergoal against Sparta Prague (it's Henry... to Fabregas... back to Henry -- crikey, that is something magical!)
3. Trying to play Stairway to Heaven on my saxophone. I am having trouble with the solo.
4. Contemplating the meaning of life.

It's all good fun, but in the long run this is tragic behavior. Change, as they say, must beckon ceaselessly for the proverbial rock. 

Spend a good bit of my time shuttling to and staying at my workplace(s). National service has, admittedly, been very kind to me. Compared to people who actually carry guns and machetes and 10-ton backpacks I am a fortunate boy. Of course it now strikes me as dastardly and cowardly behavior that I have, on some trumped-up medical charge, avoided all of this man-stuff, but I scarcely have time for such sentimentality! After all, my boss believes, as all good bosses do, that he should exploit my ability to type more than 100 words-a-minute to maximum effect. Typing reports for idiots who get caught swapping price tags in Mustafa Center, or telling an irritable mister woken up by an F16's howl that aircraft are not generally able to mute their engines, liberates the bored man to no end.

My other 'job' is teaching RI boys how to speak and think. It's been great fun while it lasted, and we did win loads of stuff, mind. But I'm actually pretty glad that I can stop for at least 6 months come June. Time to get away from hawking the 'wisdom' of experience to kids with more talent than I (or in rare and unfortunate instances, no discernible talent whatsoever), and hopefully doing something rather more meaningful with the time. Of course I'll have to find out what that "something" is. But I have no doubts at all that I will find it.

On a last note, everyone will be flooding back into the country soon enough. I thought I might be a bit more excited about the prospect, but I am oddly apprehensive instead. Am not sure why this might be the case. I suspect being away from people for too long makes you afraid that things might have changed. Kind of like when my sister flew back from London after a year away, and I must say, she became only as overbearing and emotional and silly and wonderful as I remembered.

Certainly a great many blessings to be thankful for -- some that surprised me, others that will flower in time, all of them quite undeserved. For as the Teacher would say, to every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under heaven, yes?

The Wife of Jesus Speaks
by Mary Karr

Ours was the first inch of time.
The word passion hadn't yet been coined,
and I'd not yet watched my beloved

laid out to butchery and worshipped as a virgin, son
of a virgin even. This was before the Roman
bastards hammered his arms wide

as for some permanent embrace,
before the apostles paid me to lie,
he never shuddered to death in my arms, I never

feasted on his flesh that now feeds
any open mouth, and inside me he never released
with a shudder the starry firmaments

and enough unborn creatures to fill an ark
all in salty milk I nursed on.
His God gave us no child

and even the books of salvation have not seen fit
to save me. Not the first woman
a great man denied knowing,

I said no back, for eternity.
With a rope slung over a tree branch,
I put my face inside a zero,

and with a single step clicked off
his beloved world's racket. Now my ghost head bends
sharp to one side, as if in permanent awe.

When he came down to hell and held out
that pale hand for rescue, I turned my back
(the snapped vertebra like a smashed pearl).

So my soul went unharrowed.
In these rosy caverns, you worship
what you want. I have chosen the time

in time's initial measure, history's
virgin parchment, when with his hard
stalk of flesh rocking inside me, I was unwrit.

Before me, I hold no other god.

Last Post
Carol Ann Duffy

In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If poetry could tell it backwards, true, begin
that moment shrapnel scythed you to the stinking mud...
but you get up, amazed, watch bled bad blood
run upwards from the slime into its wounds;
see lines and lines of British boys rewind
back to their trenches, kiss the photographs from home-
mothers, sweethearts, sisters, younger brothers
not entering the story now
to die and die and die.
Dulce- No- Decorum- No- Pro patria mori.
You walk away.

You walk away; drop your gun (fixed bayonet)
like all your mates do too-
Harry, Tommy, Wilfred, Edward, Bert-
and light a cigarette.
There's coffee in the square,
warm French bread
and all those thousands dead
are shaking dried mud from their hair
and queuing up for home. Freshly alive,
a lad plays Tipperary to the crowd, released
from History; the glistening, healthy horses fit for heroes, kings.

You lean against a wall,
your several million lives still possible
and crammed with love, work, children, talent, English beer, good food.
You see the poet tuck away his pocket-book and smile.
If poetry could truly tell it backwards,
then it would.

Liverpool
by Michael Donaghy

Ever been tattooed? It takes a whim of iron,
takes sweating in the antiseptic-stinking parlour,
nothing to read but motorcycle magazines
before the blood-sopped cotton, and, of course, the needle,
all for — at best — some Chinese dragon.
But mostly they do hearts,

hearts skewered, blurry, spurting like the Sacred Heart
on the arms of bikers and sailors.
Even in prison they get by with biro ink and broken glass,
carving hearts into their arms and shoulders.
But women's are more intimate. They hide theirs,
under shirts and jeans, in order to bestow them.

Like Tracy, who confessed she'd had hers done
one legless weekend with her ex.
Heart. Arrow. Even the bastard's initials, R.J.L.
somewhere where it hurt, she said,
and when I asked her where, snapped 'Liverpool'.

Wherever it was, she'd had it sliced away
leaving a scar, she said, pink and glassy
but small, and better than having his mark on her,

that self-same mark of Valentinus,
who was flayed for love, but who never
— so the cardinals now say — existed.
Desanctified, apocryphal, like Christopher,
like the scar you never showed me, Trace,
your (    ), your ex, your 'Liverpool'.

Still, when I unwrap the odd anonymous note
I let myself believe that it's from you.

Someplace Near the Passing
Kevin Célene

But of course it kills me, her yawning pains,
these slowing passions, her
silver tears aslant. She only holds my hand
because she doesn't know anymore
what it means to find
the heartbroken commonplace: two hands
clasped tight, souls drawn taut, the promise you'd
made to miss
me,
always.
Because, I don't cry. Holding mine with your hand that
doesn't sleep, as if love were enough
to hold an elegy off.
Somewhere, between memories
and the things you can't remember

Anymore, in each other's eyes,
your other hand,
that is all we feel -
Love carved out of loss.

We think the tears afresh.

Forgetfulness
Billy Collins

The name of the author is the first to go
followed obediently by the title, the plot,
the heartbreaking conclusion, the entire novel
which suddenly becomes one you have never read,
never even heard of,

as if, one by one, the memories you used to harbor
decided to retire to the southern hemisphere of the brain,
to a little fishing village where there are no phones.

Long ago you kissed the names of the nine Muses goodbye,
and watched the quadratic equation pack its bag,
and even now as you memorize the order of the planets,

something else is slipping away, a state flower perhaps,
the address of an uncle, the capital of Paraguay.

Whatever it is you are struggling to remember,
it is not poised on the tip of your tongue,
not even lurking in some obscure corner of your spleen.

It has floated away down a dark mythological river
whose name begins with an L as far as you can recall,
well on your own way to oblivion where you will join those
who have even forgotten how to swim and how to ride a bicycle.

No wonder you rise in the middle of the night
to look up the date of a famous battle in a book of war.
No wonder the moon in the window seems to have drifted
out of a love poem that you used to know by heart.

Distressed Haiku
Donald Hall

You think that their
dying is the worst
thing that could happen.

Then they stay dead.