#738 - things you can do with an outage

 

9.i.22

738

3.9

things you can do with an outage

instructional poetry series

 

the completely unexpected poem

(which is what every one should be)

but that’s just an example to kick off the list

let’s see –

 

paint a picture

play piano

drink eat everything before it goes off

walk the walk

take your walk NOW

restructure!

remember radio, my companion sadly now shhhh

dig garden

study the fall of shadows

swim in the great book of pages

stamp feet

rub paws

pick up the old acoustic

hum

attend to your kookaburras

take porridge to another place

chase the mosquito chasing you

think and now deeper

yoga the most natural way

or sex

especially in picture or poem

see if you can’t offend some decorum

an outage makes you young again!

 

feel the breeze

watch the rain

consider the eloquence of silence

 

discover things too –

for instance how does my desk fan go?

it must have a battery

but I didn’t know

 

consider ringing the battery people

get a quote for installation

 

of course you could report it –

the outage I mean

don’t

 

do not check the meter box

these things won’t make any difference

 

rely on your own charge!

 

ask yourself

‘what was that energy source?’

 

and when the power comes back on

(isn’t it always too soon?)

it’s like in It’s a Wonderful Life

when the snow starts again

because, well because it’s a miracle!

right…

but which of the worlds is the miracle? –

the actually-is or the-could-have-been?

beauty of the thing is you won’t know one without the other

maybe that’s the miracle?

how you get to the truth through the fiction

the life worth living again?

 

how now we can imagine coal being dug up

loaded onto ships, burned somewhere

people choking

 

before, it was just the lights come on

and the washing machine

the fridge keeps everything cold

now we see through to the maze of wires

how someone is dying down in a mine

and someone else in a faraway country

is breathing their last outside of a hospital

 

and that, my friends, is simply how the world goes round

you can see it now, can’t you?

 

now make a list

and count up how many things you did

before the power came back on

and next

and while you still have your thinking cap on

work out a plan

for how to do

an outage of your own