Weekly Short Stories Contest and Company! discussion
Games!
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Haiku
Goodnight, Mistress of the Realm, from Squirrel and Penelope and Spades and Tavy and Ursula the bear, and me.
Good night Al! (Can I change your title?)The non-stop Toby
rested in African trees
alone with the breeze
A forlorn stranger
in a strange land. And mouseless
he cat napped, feckless.
It's okay, then to change your title to 'Mistress of the Realm'? I could translate that into Latin to sound even more impressive. "Domina regni".LoL.
He couldn’t recallhaving felt so tired, perched
in heat of the veldt,
and he pondered the
nature of mice and owls and
the state of his bowels.
To be me or not!That is the question I face,
Toby thought, hungry.
And what of the mice?
Why had I not thought of them
when I was eating?
“Stand, fight to the death!”The words echoed through the pan-
icked mind of Barney,
who ran for cover
because he knew that was all
a bunch of blarney.
Of Mice and Cats by Jan Steinbeck Hi Khoo!
He cried on seeing his friend
But alas!
Twas the cat
And that was
The end...
Soft kitty, purringIt's not the same as growling
So what's with the claws!
Hello, Taliah! Welcome to the WSS and I commend you on a very fine contribution to this peculiar game! Very nicely done, it brought a huge smile to my face.
In the beast's bellyBarney prayed to cat gods
with retracted claws.
The cat threw him up(was it thaumaturgic?) then
heaved till he was blue.
Who could have known he
was allergic to Barney’s
new dandruff shampoo?
Very funny, M!And you introduced to me a new word: yark(ed). But when I read it's definitions I was left puzzled by how you meant it.
Thanks, Guy! I went back and changed it to “heaved.”By the way, I was rummaging through my file of poems last night and came across this:
The moonlit spider
roams a dewy mandala
that fills like a sail.
Just for fun, I sent it off to a handful of stones.
That is how I thought you meant 'yarked', as a kind of onomatopoeic word. I am going to see if I can incorporate it into some writing in conjunction with 'yar', another interesting word. Lovely! Have you been sending others to handful? I haven't recently, but I have had some success in the past with them.
Is it just my delusional thinking, but do you not find that this Haiku thread, here in the WSS, to be just about the most creatively challenging of all the threads?
But, of course, I am technically working now, and not exercising my creativity! LoL. It looks like I will be hard pressed to keep my nose from the WSS today.
This is the only thing I’ve submitted to a handful of stones.I really do find the haiku thread challenging. The form lends itself to the briefest impressions and the most sprawling narratives, to free verse and rhyme, to iambs and anapests.
I’ll be out most of the day. My sister and her kids and my parents are all meeting up for a few days at a park where we keep our travel trailers. I’m going to drive down there this afternoon and help Dad with a few chores, but I’ll be back tonight. I had hoped to come up with a story for this week, but I was lazy over the weekend.
TALIAH!!!!!!!!! OMG, how did I miss you there??? It's been ages!!!!!!!!! How are ya???
He tried bar soap, triedgasoline, tried horse shampoo
and even Comet;
nothing he tried could
get him clean, get out the aw-
ful smell of vomit.
Being scarfed then puked
had scared him turdless. Pale,
he long felt unwell,
but got over be-
ing wordless, and cried, “I owe
my life to T/Gel!”
'It was the pomade,I tell you!' Barney crowed,
'That gutted the cat
'And gave me new life —
One of his!' Barney cackled
like the thief he was.
Thanks, Guy! I think the idea of the cat’s losing one of his nine lives to the mouse is a novel one.The cat was not par-
ticularly pleased to be
bettered by a mouse,
but slouched around, bug-
eyed, and wheezed, cursing his luck,
and inclined to grouse.
YW.'... and inclined to grouse' is sooooo funny. LoL!
When the cat went back,
a soul short, a life lighter,
he'd hoped for wisdom.
But to mouse or not
was not even a question
as he ate Barney.
Still suffering fromindigestion, Ralph the cat
pondered the question.
He confessed he liked
the idea of relief
from diarrhea.
Then he turned and ran
like hell when a snickering
mouse brandished T/Gel.
Bye, Al. Have fun!And yes, M has been particularly funny, as usual. Now to come up with an appropriate response — but what would that be? To be funny or not to be? That is the question. Whether tis nobler in the pen to suffer the puns and plays of outrageous haikus, or take words against the sea of blasphemies and by opposing write them. LoL.
NO, AL, DON"T GO!!!!!!!!Wow. I'm being a drama queen today. Well, have fun, Cap'n!!!!!!!!!
Kyra: What? Not me???Nikara: You stole her honeycomb, she's not putting you in charge.
Kyra: But those Cap'n quarters are soooo nice...
Sara: Give it up already. AL IS NOT PUTTING YOU IN CHARGE.
Hello Al.Guy reporting for duty, Regina de nocte, gaudentes secundo ad sub regno Alexandreae. LoL.
I'll see if I can't get myself into the threads a little more. Wow! Have I been busy, lately.
Have fun. Leave Frank in the cabin, but be aware he will likely have cabin fever when you get back. Not sure about you, but not a pretty sounding thing to me.
Be well,
When Ralph caught his breath,he knew that he'd failed cat-dom,
that the mice had won.
Ralph wondered at that,
at being a scaredy cat
without hair products.
He knew he'd be shunned
and so sought to expiate
exfoliation.
He joined a temple
and shared his meditation
with the ghosts of mice.
He joined a templeand shared his meditation
with the ghosts of mice.
This one really got me! How subtle and funny! I don’t have good reply.
He joined an island-
jungle temple, and impart-
ed shampooed-mouse lore.
However, it was
not quite that simple. First, he
had to swim ashore.
LoL! M,However, it was
not quite that simple. First, he
had to swim ashore.
is also very metaphorically funny! Thanks for a great start to my work day.
Al, have fun with Frank. Okay, not that kind of fun especially when staying in someone's guest house! LoL!
Al, you'll need to be doubly careful, then. Weddings proffer the opportunity for great libidinous and outrageous antics as they inspire romantic thoughts and an excess of pheromone production! Take care! LoL.
You never know where Alex is going to meet the man of her dreams. What will Dr. Putnam do then?
Fictional poems!?! Guy pulls out his nonexistent hair in startled surprise and exasperation. Slowly recovers, blood dripping from the fingernail scratches.Sigh. TTC is metaphor to the inexpressible. The problem with expressing the inexpressible is that it tends to be confused with meaningless fiction. LoL.
When you have finished TTC give The Bhagavad-Gita : Krishna's Counsel in Time of War; the edition I've linked I have found to be far superior to others I've tried because it is lean and unadorned by others' interpretations. Just a little light reading while you wait for the groom to be found after his stag party goes awry.
The stag party--ingrowing darkness a last glee
enjoyed by the groom
before church bells bring
conjugal bliss, with all its
frustrations and gloom.
Though I can’t remember where I read it or just what it was, I think Jung had something to say about the incompatibility of Western man and Eastern religion.
Jung comments on that sporadically, but put his ideas in one essay, called When East Meets West (I think). I would need to double check my books to confirm the title.I remember him severely castigating 'western' man for superficially glomming onto eastern philosophy because those espousing the philosophy were profoundly ignorant of the depth of the thought they were mimicking like monkeys. (Lot of paraphrasing here, by me, but that was the gist.)
Very fun Haiku, btw. I wonder if the Hangover movie franchise could incorporate that into their next foray? LoL.
Thank you, Guy! I have such a poor grasp of Jung, and I’ve read snippets from so many books, that trying to find anything I remember having read is like trying to find a cork that’s floating somewhere in the Atlantic.
I went and checked, and I was only partially correct in my memory. I'd conflated his CW Vol 11 with an essay. CW Vol 11 is called Psychology and Religion: West and East. In that book he has many essays exploring the topic in one way or another, such as 'Yoga and the West,' and 'The Psychology of Eastern Meditation.' From his magnum opus, Psychological Types here is something I wrote out by hand 25 years ago or so, and have subsequently transcribed across my means of communication. The Western superciliousness in the face of these [East] Indian insights [into man's shadow] is a mask of our barbarian nature, which has not the remotest inkling of their extraordinary depth and astonishing psychological accuracy. We are still so uneducated that we actually need laws from without, and a task-master or Father above, to show us what is good and the right thing to do. And because we are still such barbarians, any trust in the laws of human nature seems to us dangerous and unethical naturalism. Why is this? Because under the barbarianl's thin veneer of culture the wild beast lurks in readiness, amply justifying his fear. But the beast is not tamed by locking it in a cage. There is no morality without freedom. When the barbarian lets loose the beast within, that is not freedom, but bondage.Jung, C.G. Psychological Types. Princeton: Princeton University Press, par 357.
Your poor dad! I’m glad you’ve got wi-fi at the hotel. Should I let Frank know you’ve got nothing to sleep in but your heels?
A man floats dreamilyUpon the ocean
Searching for a cork.
A girl cries wearily In a room
Searching for love.
Weekly Short Stories Contest and Company!
Books mentioned in this topic
Mugging the Muse (other topics)The Raj Quartet (other topics)
Marcovaldo (other topics)
Invisible Cities (other topics)
Confessions of a Taoist on Wall Street (other topics)
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Authors mentioned in this topic
David Payne (other topics)Thomas Merton (other topics)
Robert Payne (other topics)
Barbara Gowdy (other topics)
David K. Reynolds (other topics)
an energy bar, and soon
the owl was frantic.
The sun set. Toby
followed a star and by dawn
crossed the Atlantic.