H E L LO
I am not sure at exactly what point I thought putting these stubborn little jottings together as a collection was such a good idea but here it is, I hope it pricks your conscience, gives you a measure of pleasure or at least provokes the occasional chuckle and if, in the unlikely event you do die laughing please give me a good reference in your epitaph! Every read through tempts more tampering. As Tom Waits once said about his painting: ‘You just keep doing things to it and eventually you have to stop!” No wonder too then that it took the great poetcantor Leonard Cohen five years to write the ‘do ya’ ‘to ya’ hoo-ha of the simple sounding “Hallelujah”!
Writing or perhaps ‘wordmongering’ has been a happy compulsion rather than a hobby and as such a necessity for me. Although some of these efforts date back a few years, production stepped up on the arrival of a certain Donald J. Mistake as he became Residual in the Blight House and Dent in the United Mistakes of Americans. The wildfire of social media and arrival of the Coronavirus Pandemic with its consequent filling of hospitals and emptying of hostelries further ignited my spontaneous writing combustivity as the weirdest year of most of our lives became more unrecognisable and misshapen. We all subscribed to the ridiculousness of being sent home and locked away, many then to drop unexpectedly like flies. A few countries also tussled with political turmoil and a smattering of certain lives mattering and we later became accustomed to the dependence on smiling eyes
1
