DrBacchus' Journal

Those of you who follow my blog via the RSS feed may have just seen an article describing my first day in Moscow. This is a result of a bug in the blog software. I marked that entry "Don't Allow Comments", because it was receiving hundreds of spammy comments every day, and it was pushed back onto the RSS feed.

The trip to Russia was 3 years ago, and, alas, I have no plans to visit Russia any time soon.

Obligations To Ire

For the Weekend Wordsmith prompt Carrying A Grudge.

It takes enormous endurance
to remain angry,
even when you provide fresh reasons
day following day,
reopening wounds so old,
the original injury is a blur
in the broken rear-view mirror.

Sure, it flares up, fueled
by your careless actions,
selfish remarks, and callous manners,
but, most days, the petulant child
that you have become
merely buzzes, a trapped blue bottle
battering the panes
on a summer day when I'd rather
just be reading by the creek.

The grudge, long since
become an immovable burden,
shackled to me by a cable
of hatred and weary rage,
is to, too heavy to carry --
more like drag.

But so sure as I unfetter,
and try to escape,
you fling a hawser or two
around my raw, chafed ankles,
and remind me of my
obligations to ire.

Storms

We stand here, high on the hill,
and watch the rains come
like an African monsoon
sweeping across the desiccated
plains, dry dusty barren.

So many of these storms
lately, we just watch it come,
resigned
to the deluge that we know
we can't run fast enough
to escape. Our sadness

washes around us, even
as the rain, so long in coming,
so feared and so anticipated,
soaks our upturned faces,
hides our tears.

All very cliché, of course,
which isn't to say it's not real,
just that it's universal.

No one gets to their heaven
without a fight.

And some never
get there at all,
though they fight, seemingly,
without a respite
while the storm rages.

Those of us who have found
it, by persistence or dumb luck,
may, now and then, offer
a brief shelter
to those who, so far, haven't.

Last Christmas, The Girl begged and begged and begged for an iDog, which is a delightful little thing that dances to music either heard on its microphone or received from a audio input cable.

She played with it once or twice, but quickly lost interest. It's pretty stupid, and requires a lot of attention before it does anything interesting.

Earlier this week, The Girl and The Boy were fighting over it, so I brought it to work and plugged it into my desktop speakers. It is very weird. It whimpers occasionally, apparently when it doesn't like my music. It dances to stuff it likes. It blinks its lights in seemingly random patterns. It chirps and flashes green when you pat its head. It growls when you tweak its tail.

Here's the complete documentation, just in case you care.

When I was a kid, toys didn't come with 16-page users manuals. Sheesh.

Yesterday I drove past that place
I used to live,
on the way home to you.

I cowered behind that very window,
afraid
of the world outside,
afraid
that it wouldn't miss me,
that it wouldn't notice
that I had vanished behind that frame.

I watched, through that frame,
others living the life
I could not live,
because I was
afraid,
I knew not of what,

nor why I had been exiled
to this penitentiary
which I paid good money
to inhabit.

There, framed in that window,
another lonely soul
gazed out at me, wondering
if I saw as I went on my way,
past this refuge of those
too young to have lived,
and those done with it.