I'm clearing the decks

meaning I'm changing the sheets
and picking up books spilling out of the corners
and avoiding looking at papers spilling under my feet
and getting walked on because they won't get out of the way quick
quick but oozle slippery and jostling through mendicant-minded shuffles
pretending to be - or hungrily trying to be - awfully important
despite their sway-backed upset and crumpled corners
and avalanche-juddering whooshes
send foolscap slithering and splaying
across a Sammy Army vaguely Oriental mat

that traps the unwary foot or crossed big toe on its curly edge
and lifting fringes and draws an absent-eyed meandering look across
its faded patterns as if they got some bleached fainting disease
from being walked on or a tissue of boiled milk
plopped up up from a hot pool
and breaking through greasy clay goes poof!
and milk slithers lasciviously over the rim and splutters
onto the element where it sizzles and burns
and sends up black smoke tendrils
as if Jack and the Beanstalk went black and white
instead of growing green up into the sky from scarlet runner beans
Jack climbs to the giant's castle and you are Jack and you
steal the goose that lays the golden egg...

this pick'n'mix of purposes like licorice allsorts comes of having
differently-purposed activities happening in singly-purposed rooms -
though of course no room can be purely singular-minded -
and if minds may be singular their singleness
is never pure and often dangerously
put together like red and green wires in electric
appliances getting hooked up to the in
instead of the out channel...

or the out channel being blocked

Which is where this blog got to after the initial flurry

But now being purposed with leaving home for a small stay away
I have been clearing the decks

Bon voyage

Travelling a bit further

    This is my second lesson on the Blog highway or byway or wherever/which way one might choose... I'm learning to click on icons and not fear they'll explode (as my grandson Will predicted would happen after we'd played Fortunately/Unfortunately; the exploding face a favourite misfortune occasioning much amusement for Will and Finn...I guess a face suddenly changing emotion does seem to explode...I empathise)...
...and some time later, after those few lines of text, and life's intervening and slipping away - after Film Festival joys and social catch-ups and a poem to revise, I'm gratefully in touch with JJ to guide me through this app's intricacies. Enough to add something and get out of the site safely without an exploding face....
   Of the films I saw, Faith Connection, made at a Hindu religious festival when a hundred million people come to celebrate at the confluence of three rivers, was overwhelming. How to describe it further...still meditating. The sheer magnitude of locale and people, the joyfulness, the odd and sometimes weird skills of the Saddhu, "holy men", whose apparent philosophical likeness to may have made them the models for, western hippy communes; similarities of people everywhere despite enormous material differences, the misogyny, here mostly "slant", in that most participants are men, and women mostly absent (except for a girl child's loss of a toy in favour of a boy child's want), the beauty of place, of people...
  Later Shireen, Karen and I went to dinner at Piko, the restaurant for the Hospitality students at AUT; nice tapas, pleasant people, before going to Reaching for the Moon. A beautifully made film, and again, hard to disentangle one's revulsion at the politics from amazement at the beauty of the locale, the insouciance of the privileged, identification - sometimes rueful - with the passion of great love mixed with melancholia, pain and winces and shudders at frailities of human/women's/lovers' behaviours. Brazil looked somewhat different from glimpses of it during Football World Cup fever; the beautiful parks and outlooks supposedly planned by architect Lota de Macedo Soares, the retreat she built for poet Elizabeth Bishop to write in...and the acting's great too. Gloria Pires is superb as Lota; mostly I liked Miranda Otto's driven Bishop but was distracted by wondering whether she was channelling Streep or the poet. But Bishop's poem is a haunting theme to start and end with..."the art of losing isn't hard to master"...
   Sun today! Time to go enjoy it.
 

...

First blog suitcase

Wow! I thought it would be so hard so I didn't try it. But lo! the magic works - and the tutor! 

Thank you June and Nadege.