I met a man who scratched his head
Like someone at a loss
And, when I asked him why, he said,
Shedding huge tears, “Ah Ross,

This dandruff is a dreadful thing,
The telltale signs offend;
They fall like snowflakes in the Spring.
Oh will it never end?

I’d rather be a Beduin
And sqat in an adobe
Than always stand in snow, a man
More miserable than Job.

Oh woe is me, oh misery,
How can I stop this slough?
Bury me in the cemetary,
My skin is coming off!”

He shed more tears and more white flakes,
Shaking his sorry head,
Till I replied: “For all our sakes,
I wish that you were dead.

Look all around you, see the world,
How well all things are made!
How can a skull just going bald
Put all that in the shade?

Open your soul, your heart, your eye,
Become a man of vision!
Love Nature and her works and buy
Something for your condition.”

.

---

Good enough for a joke.

Why do you seem so small,
You in my distance there?
You are where I should be, where I most feel
I am myself at last. Only the air

Between me here you there
Makes you and me as small
As just a puff of wind. If we could share
The space between us (two halves make one whole),

I could be with you now,
You could be with me here,
Instead of which I stand back wondering how
You got to be so far away so near.

Distance has made things clear
This is our future now.
We have become the emptiness we share,
As if we somehow turned into a crowd.

.

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Looks alright for now. Anyway, the idea is there.

Current edit 25 August 2015

Scissors are just two knives and two round holes,
Something and nothing, joined to separate,
Opposing faces, each the other’s mate,
Two ends that thumbs and fingers seek as goals,

Two they avoid and that dismember wholes,
Round, looping lines and lines completely straight,
Means to life’s simple ends yet tempting fate,
Ends in themselves, like beauty, life and souls,

A Ding an sich that is for its own sake.
Yes, beauty, life and souls are scissors-like,
The nothing in the hole, the goals we seek,
Somehow entwined with substances that break

Apart, leave gaps and hurt till, grown obtuse,
We value scissors only for their use.

.

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Another sonnet. I am probably the best sonneteer writing today but that isn’t saying much – most people wouldn’t know a sonnet even if it hit them on the head with a baseball bat.