Magpie Tales#66

Inspiration this week is found in the library at Willow Manor

Four Five One (*)

When you’ve a mind to burn some books, first, burn

Psocoptera, the bookworms. They can’t run.

For a brief while they suffer, then they pop.

Don’t stop there! Get a taste for burning things.

Turn to the readers. Those who don’t agree

that burning all improper books is good

you’ll make example of by immolation.

Hear how they fizz and crack and shrivel up,

fine punishment for blemished literacy.

Better still to stop the treason at its source.

Go for the writers. Make a bigger pyre.

Herd the public out to smell their smoke,

their shrieks more damning than the words they wrote

that you did not agree with. Don’t forget

what makes a book improper is in your gift.

College, seer and Cardinal only know

heresies. You have the supreme say-so.

Then fan the flames till what’s left on the shelf

is the mindless drivel that you wrote yourself.

(*) The temperature in degrees Fahrenheit at which paper ignites spontaneously.

See Ray Bradbury’s story “Fahrenheit 451”

Magpie Tales#63

Tess at Willow Manor has a psychedelic prompt for us this week to help keep our Muses alive and well

Bad Trip

  First I phoned the police and got put through to the Drugs unit. Then I phoned my tutor. Could he meet me? I named a bar in the West End. Not the usual students' watering hole. A bit posh.  He agreed like I thought he would.

  He was there when I got there and looked sniffy when I wanted only juice. The barman set it on the marble counter. Beautiful, Italian stuff, black mottled with pink veins. Very expensive. Very solid.

  "So how was the trip, Lucy?"

  "Isn't LSD old hat? I thought this was the E era?'

  "We have to start somewhere."  He's the sort that uses a beard to mask a warped mind.

  "My trip? Well, it started with coloured lights coming at me but never getting any closer, sort of curtains of shifting colours, like the Northern Lights. Too bright to look at but still there when you close your eyes. And spinning. When they stood still, I was spinning. I thought the lights were bad till the frogs started. I was nude and covered in frogs, all different colours. I could feel them, slithery. And they stared. It seemed to go on for hours. I freaked. I could feel myself screaming and pleading with them but couldn't hear anything. The biggest one got one of my hands in its mouth. I could feel my hand being crunched. I couldn't shake it off. Then the frogs turned to stars that burst into bits of coloured glass, swirling around and shifting. The bits chased me round my room."

  "Not unusual" he said. "Lights better than frogs, eh?"

  "You could say that, except as I began to come out of it, I found I really was undressed and I'd been dribbling everywhere because my period had started and I'd smashed up a lot of my stuff."

   "Sorry about that. Valuable stuff? PC?"

    His unconcern was monumental. Was he stoned?  

   "That was my trip. Thanks, Partyman.  You really sewed up my education for me."

   "You only graduate once, Luce!" 

    "You ever have hallucinations like that? Frogs eating you alive. Stars exploding at you. Your own blood dribbling down your legs? And just as a matter of interest - where are my clothes? And how did I get home?"

  "You were the star turn, Lucy!  Hal . . lucinations. Lucy nations. Like it! Froggy bits not nice, though" He made it sound as if it should have been nice, really. "Your trips will get better. With practise. I promise. You need something stronger. I've some lines of coke? In my office?"

  Some things are just too much.

  "Ever seen a marble counter close up?" I said

  "Pardon?"

  "I mean, really close up?"

  "I'm not following."

  I put my hand on the back of his neck and shoved his head down. When his nose hit the marble I said "That close!" and the barman said "Bloody hell, lady!'

  "He's seeing stars. And I'm going quietly."

  I said something about how feeding drugs to students might just cost him his job if the Red Tops got to hear about it. And then, "By the time you've wiped your tears away and shanked it back to your office, the drugs squad will be snorting . . sorry . . sorting their way through your stash."

  I walked back to my ransacked room, thinking maybe the dope hadn't worn off, 'cos I'd just shopped a university professor and given him a bartop kiss and my heart rate hadn't gone up a hairsbreadth.  Then I started laughing so much I had to sit on a garden wall for a bit, thinking, if he's a typical male he'll put it all down to the time of the month . . .

  

   

The Poetry Bus, 18th. April

Thanks to NanU for this week's prompt. Writing about explosions buys us our ticket - we hope.

Supernova

You need darkness on the surface of the deep

and God to turn the lights on, stir the waters.  

                                                              Or

a star that's eight times heavier than our Sun.

You need time. In God's hands, Mon to Saturday.

Sunday He rested, saw that it was good -  but

should God be proud of what God did, or does?

Our star needs aeons reckoned in billions

to fuse her hydrogen to helium, 

to carbon, oxygen, to iron, a vast

slow-burning bomb releasing heat that checks

the inexorable squeeze of Gravity -

till POP!  Her fuel runs out. Then Gravity begins

to win, to wind the star in on herself -

until the energy set free by Gravity

blows the covers off.  This takes three days, maybe.

This cataclysm makes the elements 

of all we are. The shock wave sweeps them,

piles them as new stars, new earths, new deeps.

All this is just as slow as God was quick.

You are Godmade. You are Stardust. Take your pick.

The Hubble telescope picture is of the so-called "Crab" nebula in the constellation Taurus.  It is the remains of a supernova which exploded in 1054. It is 6500 light years away. It is now 11 light years across  and is still expanding at about 1500 kilometers per second.  Our Sun is not massive enough to become a supernova. A probable supernova candidate in our Milky Way galaxy is Betelgeuse, one of the brighter stars in the constellation Orion.

Magpie Tales#62

Our hostess, Willow at Willow Manor serves up a hearty breakfast. A real Willow Pattern prompt!

  

Not The Full Picture!

  I sometimes stayed at my Grandma's on Saturday and she would fry eggs for my Sunday breakfast and put them on a blue and white plate she called her willow pattern. The plate had a picture and when she gave me my breakfast she said a poem that told the story of the picture. The eggs covered most of the picture and I would eat the eggs bit by bit so that the things in the picture showed through the cuts I made in the eggs. Then Grandma said, "Don't pick at your breakfast, child!" because how was she to know what I was doing?  I had to remember the picture and the poem, and I had to make my cut-outs in the right order, and after a few breakfasts at Grandma's I got quite good at it. One Sunday I asked her could I have the little pointy knife she called her fruit knife.

  "Goodness, Lucy! What for?"

  "To make smaller holes. Please Gran?" All I wanted was to cut closer to the outlines of the birds, the little ship, the men on the bridge, the willow tree. It wasn't as if I didn't eat the cut out bits. I ate one piece while I worked out where the next hole had to be. Grandma made lovely fried eggs, just fried enough so the yolk wasn't so runny it filled up the holes. If it did I mopped it up with bits of toast so I could see the picture properly.

  Grandma frowned but gave me the knife from her knife drawer and went away to the telephone and when she came back, my eggs looked like a lace hankie with the fence and the apple tree and the temple and everything showing through. Then I ate the egg hankie and the toast and asked Gran what an eating disorder was.

  "I heard you on the phone talking about an eating disorder or something. That was a nice breakfast, Gran."

  "I'm happy to see you finished it. At last."

   After that, Grandma didn't always make fried eggs. Sometimes it was just cornflakes, or sausage and tomatoes on a white plate and all you can do with sausage is eat a little tiddy piece from one end and then a tiddy piece from the other till you get to the middle bit and eat that and that's not much fun, and I could do that at home anyway. When I asked Mum if we could get a plate with the willow pattern for fried eggs she said they were too expensive and too many fried eggs gave you colseterol or something so I put on my sulking face for a bit, which I would never do at Grandma's. Mum wouldn't tell me about eating disorder either and I didn't tell her about cutting holes in the eggs to show the picture.

  But I never forgot Grandma's little poem.

Magpie Tales#61

Tess at WIllow Manor invites writers to join her for drinks with this week's picture prompt.

He had been hitting on me all through lunch. And leering, only he wouldn't see it as leering, nach. You meet them all over, slightly obese, slightly sweaty, massively overpaid, superficially married. Always telling you about their nought to sixty go-faster motor or how they get complimentaries for Wimbledon. And now, here he is, thinking, "I've got something she wants." (A job on offer) "She's got something I want." (Guess. Go on, guess). I'm thinking, "No, Tubs, this is not what's meant by Human Resource Management."
  By the time the waiter trundles the dessert cart to the table and he orders the chocolate cheesecake, he's pretending he doesn't realize he's pressing my little tiddy toes not so gently under his hoof. I suppose the wine has made him feel bold, confident and in charge.
  "So," he says, through cheesecake, "What about it?" A double-entendre that goes echoing round the restaurant. I lean towards him, and arch my toes under the hoof. And wiggle them. And lower my voice a little. "What about what? And when about what?" His face changes to "She's mine! She's mine!"
 "The arrangement sounds O.K to me. I'd have hoped for a higher salary." Very straight face.
 "We'll see what we can do. It's up to the Board, you realize? Now . . when can we - ", he pauses " - or rather, when can you start?"
  I pick up my glass, and incline it towards the bottle. "Let's start with dwinkies."
 "Why not?" He fills my glass, then his. This empties the bottle. The way he tips it up means "Shall we get another?"
 "Why not?"
 He twists round in  his chair, looking for the waiter. When he turns back to me I have balanced my glass on the backs of my left hand fingers, a few inches above the table, palm down.  He looks puzzled. My glass is perfectly steady
 "It's a test for tremor. To see if you're athetoid. Or have a tendency to Parkinsons. Try it. Go on." I make winsome faces and pick up his glass with my other hand. He holds out his left hand. I place his glass on his fingers, and there we are, the two of us, playing itty-bitty lovers' games, left hands flat, wine glasses balanced.
 "You have nice, steady hands," I say, adding a little "Mmm!" as I touch the tips of his fingers. Now he will do anything for me. So when I say, "Let's test your other hand," he holds it out at once.
  I take my glass from my left hand and place it on his right. So now he has  brimming full glasses of red wine balanced on the backs of both hands. Get the picture?
  "Manage your slimy way out of that! Let the wine flow free!"
  He says "Wha . . what?" He doesn't get it yet.
  I get up, unsling my bag from the back of my chair, sling it on my shoulder.
  "Stick your job. Overweight little creep. Bye Bye."
  I leave him shouting after me. So what. I've been called a bitch before.

We earn our tickets on the Poetry Bus this week by using Danabug's
prompt as the first line/phrase of a poem . . . 


Domestic Math


I am a crooked line. No doubt there is

a complex function linking me to you

that perfectly reflects my crookedness.

And that's always the trouble, isn't it?

Math leaves no room for any imperfection.

So. Given 'X' we will always find 'Y' 

defined with such precision as we choose.

I am your complex, silly, crooked X.

and all my defeX you've evaluated

so you'll come out just perfect - that's math's way.

I daren't complain 'Y won't you wash the dishes?

Y leave your dirty washing on the floor?

Y do you often fart and always snore?

Y must you shout an swear and slam the door?

Your so. So Y! I can't stand you any more.'

Magpie Tales#60

Another evocative picture for this week's Magpie Tales from Tess at Willow Manor  . . . where you can read many other responses.

STREET SCENE

The inquest found that the motorcyclist was not to blame.

The rainspots on the visor seemed not right, what with all the blood.  The bike had veered to avoid the usual child-running-into-the-road. But at the wrong, wrong moment the driver of a van, double-parked, had swung a rear door open. It struck the bike, not hard, but hard enough. The bike veered again, mounted the kerb, beyond control now. The biker wrestled it but I could see it was hopeless. The front wheel hit the shop front, under the window. The biker came over the handlebar and through the window. Head first. The window came down in a cascade of glass. The assistant - I remember his white trilby - had just wrapped my square sausage and pork chops. He managed "Jeez!" and raised an arm. He was lucky.  I was lucky. The woman next to me . . dear God, you don't last long with a slice of glass in your neck. Blood pumped out in great spurts. Even if there's anything you could do there's no time. I stood, pissing my knickers while she gurgled "Somebody help me" before she fell.  The biker ended up on the display slabs just inside the window, in a heap of leathers and boots and smashed  trays with beef cuts and link sausages and lambs' liver.  I can't remember much about what happened next but when I got outside there were folk milling round and gawping, and pretty soon sirens, and beat cops keeping folk back. The bike lay on the pavement. The biker had crawled out of the shattered window and seemed okay and was sitting on the pavement against the shop's front wall where the bike had hit, every limb shaking. I crouched down close by.  Bits of mince or something stuck to the leathers. I brushed them off, thinking "How pathetic is that?"

    "Take your helmet off. Get more air."  The black, rain spattered plexiglass wasn't even cracked. You wonder - you can't see in, how do they see out? I said, "I saw it all. I was in the shop. I'll witness." What's the point of saying "You weren't going fast. Didn't look like your fault." An ambulance was drawing up. Paramedics came over. I said, "I think we're O.K. In the shop." They crunched over broken glass. Blood was trickling across the shop step. The biker had taken the helmet off. A girl! Close cropped fair hair. My age for a guess. So shocked even her jaw was shaking.  I don't know what you do for shock. I put an arm round her. 

   And d'you know what she kept saying, over and over?  I mean, this would be insanely funny except that there was a woman lying bleeding to death in a wrecked butcher shop. She kept saying "But I'm vegetarian. I've always been a vegetarian."

   The paramedics came out of the shop. What was on the stretcher was completely covered and they were not hurrying.