Expectorants bring out the worst in me.

To wheeze or not to...
Do I really have a choice?
Snot is not noble.

Alas. I am ill. This is the best haiku I can produce. It probably does not deserve to be posted, but I feel I must.

I have just discovered another form of Japanese poetry called Tanka, that allows one a couple more syllables than haiku. Well, Tanka you very much.

Role-playing is a tough game.

I won't play Barbie
or Sacrificial Virgin:
Woman's hard enough.

Hmm. It's not really me, but I like it. A bit of porcelain inspiration (i.e. those flashes of wisdom that come to us while seated in tiny tiled rooms). I was thinking of making it "Forty is hard enough" (I just turned 40 two weeks ago!) but I really like being forty and it seems like it could be a fun year so I didn't want to suggest it's something that one needs to survive or struggle through. (But womanhood is? Another Hmm.)

"Love is not ...

Dear me! At the bottom of this poem, I had added a post-script in a special phonetic code that I'd invented just for such dramatic revelations: "Written when stoned."

Looking back now, I realise that grass does NOT enhance creativity. It just seems that way at the time. So here it is .. a cheesy, grassy poem from my freshman year, that, in at attempt to be profound, comes out quite pretentious. But also leaves me a little sad for the girl who wrote it.

Love is not true
once it is spoken.
The betrayal of feelings
renders the spell broken.

Look between the green blades
Up at the flowers of love.
There is no climbing up
Or tasting the pollen.
Cutting blades and piercing thorns
Will stand in your way.

But the wind will send you a wafting
of those pleasures yet unclaimed
And love is not the rose
but the perfume you cannot see --
The scents that fly swift and free
Uncaught, for if plucked,
a rose and its perfume will die.

So true love is the love from afar
The love that will never be proven wrong.

(written on December 4th, 1984, in Missouri, USA)