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Something for Everyone

by Jodie Catherine

It's like trying to move quickly through
oceans of jelly. I'm surprised I'm not
drowning 'cause I'm in it over my head.

You can't have two different rules, one
for the dogs and one for the cats; to be
fair, you need to treat them both the same.

When the air is really cold you can feel
it all the way through your nasal passages,
all the way into your lungs and heart.

I can only write poems with a blue pen,
with a black pen, nothing happens.

To start of with it looked really "dickey",
and I thought, "Oh, here we go...";
but by the time he'd finished,
it looked like the Taj Mahal, and hey - I was impressed.

You know I've been here before,
and I'm not just talking deja vu experiences,
I have actually, LITERALLY, been here before.

And when I start to explain it,
my tongue grows thick and dry,
so the words won't slide out,
they clog up like a brick wall in my throat.

I didn't say it hadn't been done before,
believe me, I hear the same garbage every night of the week.

And yeah - he'll say that I'm a genius,
but he treats me like a fool,
and I am a fool to think it could be otherwise.

If you're not going to tell, then I won't breathe a word of it,
but worst comes to worst,
a brisk round of "row, row, row your boat" always goes down well I've found.

And everything's just everything,
and Lisa's not the only one talking "so" -
the superlatives don't raise an eyebrow these days.

I'd like to be able to say "I have nothing more to say to you",
but the very idea makes me giggle, and it would lose all it's impact.

No, no... I think if you saw the world the way my eyes do,
you wouldn't need to drink either.

In dreams, when my hands drop off,
it looks so excellent that I have to call everyone around to watch
and I do it again. "Watch this" I say, and shake,
and 'clunk' and we all fall about laughing.

And it's not so much about avoiding a clichéd "happy" ending,
it's far more about not having wasted an entire afternoon struggling to say the same thing
I always say, which is that communication is a struggle,
and wanting to communicate is even more of a struggle,
and the only way I have found to best communicate anything is to point out
how incomprehensible it all seems to be...

So... here we all are once again,
and what will I do now?
OH GOD!! LOOK!!
(run away, run away).

Darlington, October 2001