By: Jim Murdoch

Kairos

Who lets slip Fortune, her shall never find.
Occasion once pass’d by, is bald behind.
– Abraham Cowley, Pyramus and Thisbe

There is only now.
There is no unnow or antinow.
There are past nows
and the nows to come
(the so-called thens and whens)
and, of course,
the nows that can never be
but they don’t count.

What counts
is what we do
with our nows.

Once people regarded nows
as basically interchangeable
imagining they were identical.
Not so. Much like snowflakes
no two are exactly the same.
Being in the now is a far cry
from living in the moment.
It took a while to dawn on us

but once it did
demand
soared.

Many were reduced to
rehashing old nows, or
retooling not nows
(and even never evers), or,
and this is a troubling trend,
living life vicariously
through the nows of others,
mostly celebrities and children.

I’ve preserved some of mine
in poems.
For a rainy day, I tell myself.

Caerus [Kairos] had hair on his forehead, the sort that covers his face, not allowing people to recognise him easily, but was bald at the back. The moral was clear. If you had to prosper, you had to grab opportunity by the forelock, for once it fleet-footedly goes past you, there will be nothing for you to grab it by. – ‘Upstart: the story of Caerus and his locks,’ Thejaswi Udupa, The Hindu, July 30, 2018

More = Less

Geniuses are the loneliest people on Earth
– Peter Rodgers, poet (IQ 157)

A child who knows
five thousand words
can only be half as honest
as a man who knows
ten thousand.

That said, a man who knows
forty thousand
can lie twice as eloquently
as a man who only
knows twenty.

I am currently au courant
with a personal lexis exceeding
eighty thousand words
in various registers of English.
You do the math.

* According to a recently conducted study by The Economist, most adult native speakers of the English language, who took their vocabulary test, have a range from 20,000 to 35,000 words. The average of native test-takers of the age 8 was 10,000 words and 4-year-olds have already a considerate amount of 5,000 words.

Xanthophobia

What a horrible thing yellow is – Degas

No one’s
favourite colour
is yellow.

I mean, I suppose someone’s
favourite colour
is yellow

but I really can’t imagine anyone’s
favourite colour
being yellow.

This feels very narrow-minded of me.

Also, I
don’t get people who
don’t get poetry.

Apart from yellow poetry
but, seriously, who in his right mind
writes yellow poetry?

Even Emily Dickinson
couldn’t pull that one
off.

###

Jim Murdoch is a Scottish writer living in Cumbernauld. He’s been writing for over fifty years and his list of rejections is voluminous but he keeps at it. He’s written most things over the years–novels, stories, songs, even plays–but he thinks of himself primarily as a poet and is currently producing poems at an unpresented pace. There are worse things to be in your sixties.