Haiku #266

After all, they'll not
scrap hospital parking fees -
for your sake, they'll stay

Haiku #265

Owls in sharp decline?
Songbirds changing their habits?
Blame the light pollution.

Watercolour : Wisley Gardens

A bit of an experiment, this one. A view of the Royal Horticultural Society Gardens at Wisley. Watercolour.

Haiku #264

Out of action again folks - cataract operation. Best I can do for now!

They affect your brain
as if you were watching porn --
money-off offers.

Haiku #263

Hot chilli peppers --
harmless-looking chocolate sweets
approach with great care

Haiku #262

The words in your thoughts --
they're learning to decode them
using brain scans.

Haiku #261

Tony Blair was warned --
not news perhaps for some of us --
Iraq illegal

The Poetry Bus -- and Haiku #260

(Not sure about this - only just gotten around to it. Dragonfly asked for a poem on a colour.)

Yellow

Most likely colour to disappoint
when decorating a room
but get it right, it will lift your heart --
the colour of sun and moon.

Most likely colour to disappear
in some of its manifestations.
Some hues will fade as flowers in spring
but amber outlasts our adorations.

A colour to savour, a colour that smiles,
a pigment to mix with the brightest and best --
as autumn does, as oranges do.
A beauty of nature, made manifest.

There are yellows more luscious than purples on popes
when adorning the female form
and blessed is the soul that wakes to its light
when it bathes the whole world at the dawn.

There are flowers like the jonquil --
a powerhouse, you'll find --
so blushingly bright...
even seen by the blind.

---

Frenchmen admitting
themselves a shade below par --
that's in the bedroom

Clevedon Break and Haiku #259

Normal service has not lasted for long, I fear. This week is much taken care of with hospital trips, a cataract operation, a 70th birthday celebration and other affairs of state and family.

Here for now, three photographs taken on our recent break with friends. We stayed in a hotel in Clevedon and had rooms looking across the nine miles or so of the Seven estuary to the south coast of Wales. Unbelievably, we had good weather. I have chosen - for speed as much as anything - three notices which caught my eye. Please do click to enlarge if you cannot read the notices! The last image - which chronologically should have been first - worried and amused me. It was about twenty feet, I should guess, below our bedroom windows. The lower photograph is of the Abbot's Fish Pond at Glastonbury Abbey. I just wondered what sort of fish he kept there.

(Oh, and if you hadn't guessed, the guy on the rocks is yours truly - he fell getting off. Went quite a smacker!)

---

Those owing most tax
will get the least time to pay --
Tax democracy

Haiku #258

Rebuilding the wall
Potsdam property owners
keep out the riff-raff

Haiku #257

This one's really me. Normal service has been resumed.

Cleavages don't help
in ninety seconds they decide -
bosses at interview

Ever

Nothing succeeds for ever
there must come an end
and the end must be a success
and for ever
for beyond the success of the end
or its failure
lies - in both senses
lies - the unthinkable
a tear in the fabric
where a new theory of gravity
may be played on a violin.

It is a failure of the universe
to become universal
a giant who stands in the way
an ogre
from whom there is no escape
for the mind.

It swallows the mind
all passions
successes and failures
and spits them out as they ever were
and for ever.

If ever so much as a mouse
should escape the colossus
the grand implausibility
and scuttle on by it
all logic and art
religion and science
all fear and distress
and all earthly balms
even heaven itself
would collapse
and for ever.

My hope
and yours the hope
of mankind
is pinned to that mouse
if only because
it has not read the script.

---

Normal service should resume tomorrow

Haiku #256

Moles are burying
destabilising gravestones -
Mansfield cemetery

Haiku #255

Google's warning us
our data's at risk on the web -
we're screen-fixated

Haiku #254

they've zapped the genome -
so healthier, crunchier
juicier apples... yeah?

You may not think this funny

I saw it in the Mail a few day ago. By Emma Messenger.

Many women find themselves virtual widows thanks to their husbands all-consuming hobby. But pity the wife in Japan whose engineer husband devotes his spare time to calculating the value of PI and has just broken the world record by by working it out to five trillion places. The previous record was 2.7 trillion. For the rest of us, the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter is 3.14. Shigeru Kondo achieved this feat on a home computer he built for a cost of £11,550. It took the machine 90 days to complete the arithmetic, though there were some tense moments - including (and here comes the unfunny bit!) the Kondos's daughter fusing the electrics with a hairdryer.

Boo hoo, alas, alack and shame, I and my (not so) trusty computer are to be parted for a few days. I have left stuff scheduled and will try to read any comments left, but replying will be problematic. Normal Service to be resumed as soon as possible.

Haiku #253

grain thieves said Mao
then pardoned the tree sparrow
for eating all the pests.

Haiku #252

Don't call them Honey,
Sweetheart, Darling, love or Pet --
women hate them all

Waterfall in Barcelona - and Haiku #251

Painted a couple of years ago from sketches made in a park in Barcelona. It is watercolour strengthened with some body colour.



Haiku  #251
No snaps of mum and dad
no more albums in the attic
now they've gone digital

Wry Smile - and Haiku #250

Two articles together in my newspaper this morning: one reporting that if you don't sleep well you're for an early death - especially men; the other with the information that drinking one cup of coffee every day will see you through a long and healthy life. I could not help but wonder what if you sleep badly and drink a coffee every day... what then?




Their plan: a wrapper
to stop your choc' bar melting --
even in the sun.