It was that time again. Not the kind
that you view with suspicion; like when you haven’t checked your digital clock
for ages and yet every evening when you do it somehow manages to be 22:22 and
you point and shout “Look at the time! It’s doing it again!”, whilst everyone
else rolls their eyes and dreams of a quieter time. A time of greater
simplicity. A time when twenty-two minutes past ten was completely
inauspicious. Just a seemingly random allocation of big and small hands that
held little or no meaning at all beyond ‘It’s not quite twenty-five past yet’.
No, it wasn’t one of those times. It was more like one of those times where
you’re part of two, separate friendship trio’s that merges for a merry day of
relaxing mirth. In this happy instance, it was the case that Dail and Robin (a
man friend of Dail’s) sometimes hung out with Kara (a lady friend of Dail and
Robin’s). At other times, they also hung out with Caroll (another lady friend
of Dail and Robin’s). But on this day of days (a Saturday to be quite obsessive
about it), they were all together, watching a movie at Kara’s house.
The movie wasn’t even out in cinemas
yet, but Kara was doing some baby-sitting for some neighbours who happened to
be directors and may have had some Bafta nomination DVD’s that they weren’t
beyond lending out. Delirious amounts of tea had been sipped, many choice words
had been uttered as tongues were burnt, movies had come and gone and eventually
chatting had re-emerged from its movie-length snooze and started prancing
around the room like a particularly theatrical deer.
As usual, questions of why Dail’s
book still hadn’t stumbled out of its bedsit, yawning and blinking in the cold,
harsh daylight, were trained at the would be author.
“I’ll have you know,” Dail
proclaimed “that I have in fact written something.”
“Sweet monkey Christ!” announced
Robin. “S’about time, isn’t it?”
“That it is. It’s a poem and it is
titled ‘One Man And His Log’.”
Worried glances passed between Kara
and Caroll, who sensed that some fairly childish verse was hyperactively
bounding towards them; outstretched hands sticky from sweets whilst its mud
covered face drooled like a frog-spawn on the edge of a chair.
“I actually wrote it on the way over
here…” Dail admitted whilst pulling a weather beaten notebook out of his bag.
After a fairly disgusting clearing of the throat, he began to read. Out loud of
course, or the phlegm relocation scheme would have been entirely uncalled for:
A man did drive down the motorway
He had been gone 3 years and a day
When a sudden ache did grow inside
His mouth did drop, his eyes grew wide
He pulled over to the side of the road
Into a forest, he quickly stowed
In his bowels, anarchy
Soon to be, misery
Sprayed all over the nearby trees
A shaky feeling controlled his knees
Exhausted from this dramatic feat
The man did ponder, “What did I EAT?!”
He looked around for something with which to
wipe
But in the confusion, in the hype
He grabbed the nearest thing to him
Onwards and upwards, and the finger therein
Suddenly, a burning sensation did grip his
arse
And the thought then came to him at last
Shock, horror, disbelief…
He’d wiped with poison ivy leaf
Trousers round ankles through the woods he
ran
A horrific sight, for he was a man
Reddened now, was his rump
With trousers round ankles, he could not jump
Over the tree root that lay in his path
He was feeling the poison ivy’s wrath
Down a hill, half naked he fell
All the time his buttocks did swell
He landed in a babbling brook
And opened his eyes just in time to look
At the many small children lined up on the
bank
On a school trip they were, wrecked, to be
frank
A lift back home, he caught on their bus
The boils on his arse started spouting puss
Homeward bound, did swiftly go
To a tube of cream, and some hot coco
The cream supplied a soothing sensation
Whilst on TV he watched a demonstration
On the steps to take if stung by ivy
Is anyone else here sensing the irony?
“Are you proud of that?” asked Caroll
eventually, a look on her face like she’d just opened a fridge with something
highly questionable at the back of it.
“Not particularly. Just needed to kill some
time on the tube.”
“Well I think you’ve managed to kill it
fairly successfully. I’m informing the police of it immediately. ”
“What happened to his car?”, this from Kara,
with her degree in English.
“Kara, you have a degree in English. Surely
there is more in that poem to offend you than a minor wormhole in the plot?”
Dail knew that the poem he had written was rubbish; immature even. But he
maintained that letting that side of you out in writing was much more harmless
than, say, going into a crowded playground and forcing yourself onto the
roundabout before realizing that you get severely bad motion sickness and
ruining the seesaw for everyone.
“I know but…did he, like, go back and pick it
up afterwards?” Kara asked hopefully.
“Yes. He did. They all lived happily ever
after. Apart from some arthritis when he got older. But hey, that’s life. You
get older, things start falling to bits…you know how it is.”
“Sarcasm. Nice!” expulated (again, not a word
but should be) Robin. What followed was the kind of high-five that can only
ever occur between two fully-grown males that spend far too much time together.
Once they’d returned from the kitchen with ice to numb the pain in their hands
and more tea for everyone, they found Caroll deep in conversation with Kara
about the intricacies of the poem that had essentially just poked them in the
ears with a toy dinosaur whilst they themselves poked the weather beaten book
at the heart of the debate. So, giving the empty sofa something to do, regaled
past glories and tried to conjure up a means to create some new ones in the
near future.
“I still have a mark there, you know.” Dail said in a
hushed, ashamed tone.
“Well you were just in the wrong
place at the wrong time.”
“Hardly. It was nothing but bravery.
We won, didn’t we?”
They
had gone paintballing some months previously, before anyone’s imagination
starts working too hard.
