When I paid for my shopping at the supermarket check-out the other day, the assistant rejected one of the coins, telling me it was foreign.
She was wrong: it wasn’t foreign, it was old. Somehow this had got into in my purse: 
feeling positive
Although I understand that they simplify the process of marking tests and correlating results, I have never been fond of multiple-choice-style questions: all too often there are ambiguities that force you to second guess what the examiners want you to answer.
This shouldn’t be a problem when the question is just asking you to rate how you feel about something, but the following question from a recent YouGov survey had me confused:
Continue reading “feeling positive”
the poet’s voice
Sometimes the sky seems solid: there are no thoughts; no words; no voice. Sometimes there seems to be no poet.
Aphonia
I have lost my voice.
The murmur of the traffic is enough
to drown the sound of my ideas. Star grit,
like broken oyster shells, embeds itself
in my soft palate and I choke
on smoky clouds as I aspire
to the feathered tops of pine trees.The moon dissolves,
a luminescent coughdrop,
liquid on my tongue.
fear of losing it
Actually, not fear of losing it so much as fear of losing them. Some ten years of digital photos (plus assorted translations, stories, poems, and other memories) stored on an external hard drive which is currently refusing to boot.
There comes a point, of course, where you have to admit that the past does disappear and this is just something you have to deal with.
I am currently taking comfort in the idea that “Nothing is lost for ever […] except for the Cathedral of Chalesm”, coupled with the fact that the little blue light still comes on when I connect the disk, so perhaps it is not altogether dead.
Some more recent photos, including this one, have not been lost: 
sunshine
Yes, sunshine.
That seems to be all that needs to be said.
don't confuse the narrator 