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Miscellaneous Poem-like Objects (MPOs)


malign

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How Far is Away?

Seventeen floors

over Shinjuku

wondering if

the glass would break

Keeping vigil

through the night

on loose chairs in

Edinburgh Airport

When you go that far

away from yourself

who is it

you come back to?

-------------------------------------------------------------

Smart Man

It's late and the old man is downstairs

watching football on the TV,

curled sideways in front of his best chair,

the way he always drank beer.

My mother is sitting behind him,

knitting and pretending to watch.

She thinks that she cannot be elsewhere,

that it's what a good wife should do.

We're losing and the Scotsman is yelling

crude shit that they called him in youth,

rude things 'bout the referee's parents

that oddly were true of his own.

The rest of us come 'round to make sure

that everything's really okay.

The old man is smarter than we are,

or would be if he weren't so drunk:

He yells that we don't need to worry;

he's right 'cause he'll soon be asleep.

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My father was a very intelligent man, who had a very rough childhood (he was illegitimate and his step-father was abusive), and who relaxed / re-humanized / de-humanized himself after a hard day of work by drinking beer. He yelled, but he restrained himself from violence pretty well considering his own upbringing. Once the beer had loosened his inhibitions enough, he would try to communicate how much he loved us. Only to my child self, it seemed like the beer talking. I loved him anyway.

The first one is vague allusion to two occasions, both in foreign countries, when the ex and I had fought, which we often did when travelling. The question, really, is the important part: I had gone far away from myself, and I wonder who I've come back to. Certainly, he's a different guy ...

They came to me on separate occasions, the second one in the middle of the night, and I jotted them down into a journal, which is a novelty for me. Besides blogging, I haven't kept a journal for very long, before. Then, they wanted me to type them out ...

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I'm very glad that Ken's comment finally inspired you to share more about the MPOs and your related memories! :-)

A new journal seem like a good news (although I'm afraid now you'll share less with us :o (?)...).

Your "I loved him anyway" brings back some of my thoughts about me being a strange child: I obviously couldn't cope with the aspects of my mom I didn't like (and she has never been abusive or aggressive to me!!) and for some time (I'm sorry that I cannot remember when and for how many years (perhaps only months?) - I'm curious about it!!), I "split" her (in my mind) "into two persons", altering randomly - one I loved, the other one I disliked and didn't even love :-(. I wonder if I could imagine how it is to love someone abusive. I couldn't even truly love my own mom (how awful even to write it down!), just because I didn't like some, never serious, things about her! :-( When I was older and obviously not believing in those "two moms" anymore, I had an ambiguous relationship to her, I think. I realize I'm still not sure if "love" can be ambiguous. Is it still love, then? I'm writing it here because it occurred to me in the context of your comment and because you may have some insights. But I realize it's egoistic - those insights will be "good for me", not you :o...

("illegitimate" is one of the many very strange English words (although not among the strangest, of course) - having several or lots of different meanings, in this case it's a bit strange to me how strongly the "extra-maritial status" remains connected, in the language, to the "law", to the "outlawed status" which, I'd say, is no longer the case. I wonder if in the current "wave of" political correctness (like saying "children with special needs" instead of "handicapped" etc.), this will be finally replaced somehow. Me, as illegitimate myself, I don't care, truly. I'm just wondering if somebody will want to "intervene", quite uselessly, also here...)

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I don't know why Edinburgh Airport had ordinary single chairs (I would've expected those rows of chairs fastened together, but they didn't have them), but the couple of us random travelers who were there overnight (there were no flights between 1 AM and 6 AM or so) drew them together to chat and pass the time. I made friends with a Scot who was leaving his girlfriend, rolling a old pink suitcase of hers that she had packed his things in.

Basically, those are events from my marriage, heavily edited, perhaps to make them sound more romantic ... Oddly, in the high-rise hotel in Shinjuku, (part of Tokyo), Japan, there was a chair involved too: that's what I was imagining breaking the glass with.

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