Another Day, Another Dolor

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A sign in the classroom read: Monastic Ideal Strictly Enforced. Sam had spent the entire year working on a crucifix. He had planed it, he had sanded it, he had chiseled out the joint  -- but always McGillvery had found fault. He had never made the lines straight, although he had made them smooth; and McGillvery had never given him the glue to join the pieces. At the end of the year, when the other boys took their work home to show their parents, Sam stole a wooden letter holder painted to resemble a mailbox.

Down the toilet
Out to sea
Nobody means nothing
To me.

Down to Hell
Up to the throne
“He travels fastest
Who travels alone.”

It’s never over
when it’s on.
When it’s off
it’s forever gone.

Railroad Sue
Railroad Sue
I never work.
How about you?

Row upon row of sorrow
The graveyards of auto wrecks
Nothing as fun as fast

Heaven sheds on the earth round
Teardrops, and that’s it; I rather
Doubt heaven is sincere.

God is a figment of solitude.

Empty ring of cold white ice
Dangles in air very nice

Hard as marble in March
Melting with a music of manacles

Dripping with the tap of a drum.
Why she smile and me so glum?

When I was a toddler in Kingston, an older boy led me into a shed in a backyard on Cooper Street. He unfolded some newspapers and spread them across the floor. Then he lit matches and tossed them on the papers. Then we exited deliberatively and walked over to Albert Street. A fire engine soon blared its arrival. The shed was engulfed in flames!

A few days later my family moved to a new house built on Churchill Crescent. A month afterward at a birthday party, the older boy told me a marshal from the fire department came calling. and seemed suspicious of him.

Many years later I heard that this boy had become a long-time resident of the local mental hospital.

At the beginning of the First Ice Age, ancient man, called Homo Erectus, started to move out of Africa. Was that strange timing? How could African apes survive perpetual winter?

Fire.

Me: It’s Ash Wednesday, babe. We have to give up sex.

Her: What’s Ash Wednesday?

Me: It’s the beginning of Lent. We must mortify our flesh.

Her: What’s Lent?