You know how it never rains but it pours? Well instead of siphoning these out gradually, here’s one more little ditty, for a dear friend who got me onto reading Dorothy Parker properly recently, The Portable Dorothy Parker in fact.
Evening y’all! x
Dorothy
It is all your fault
that I picked up this pen.
Your acid tongue
your shrewd remark
has inked my
wanton writer’s heart
and makes me speak my mind.
a.k.a. An Ode to Johnno
A day home sick in bed has helped me to publish a couple of things I’ve had waiting in the wings for ages (there’s MORE!!). I wasn’t sure whether to pop this on the blog but what the heck! This is a little poem that maybe no-one will relate to as it is so many years too late – but it is an Ode to Johnno….
An Ode to Johnno who called me a Big Blonde Doozie
when I was 20 and impressionable.
An Ode to Johnno
who died too young.
He whom I fell head over heels for
despite him “batting for the other side”
as he gently told the 80 year old Aileen.
He who was good, thirty-something and wise
and so so beautiful.
With the biggest hair, lankiest body
and best throaty head thrown back laugh this side of Texas.
An Ode to Johnno
the thought of you still brings an ache to the back of my throat
you listened to my idle complaints and ills when I had had an oh so smooth path
listened to them over and over with interest, compassion and always humour.
Johnno I miss you.
An Ode to Johnno.
Memory is a slippery thing is it not. The older I get the more I am faced with the fuzzy edges and complete blanks of thousands of recent and not so recent moments of my life.
One of my favourite ways to dust off a memory and hold it tightly in my mind’s eye, if only for a little while, is to look at the books and CDs from my past.
A glance at the cover of an old book can convey a hundred tiny details. The seat you sat on in the bus when the dog died unexpectedly in House of the Spirits and you struggled not to sob.
The pages of Patrick Suskind’s Perfume bringing to life the 20 year old you who was so painfully in love with he who gave you the book.
The swollen pages of a Malcolm Gladwell bringing you back to a post-pool read on a sunlounge in Bali with your children’s ages cemented in a beautiful time as they squirmed next to you, begging to be let back in the pool.
And the signed CD from a friend of a friend who was in a (not great!) band when you were 19 and who remembered seeing you in a red suit in Martin Place a year before you met him.
Would I stumble upon these memories as easily if I didn’t have the physical memento; would they be lost in the minutiae of my everyday life……. and never seen again?
What will be the Memory of a life: digital edition?
voxblonde 