Streamers & Fairy Lights

It creeps up from the back of your head to the forefront of your mind, the idea.  You try and pin it down on paper but it scarpers.  You try again, it evades.  Again, and it vamooses.  

You manage a semblance of thing plucked from a stray cloud of silver lining but it is far removed from what you glimpsed.  An abstract configuring, an ink-bleed, paint-scraped, notion of the thing.  A sister thing, a cousin thing of the original platonic idea.  Tis a two-dimensional face of the dodecahedron.  Just one angle of the tetrahedron.  It’s Pythagoras hiding behind a curtain, for he was rumoured to be so good-looking, he didn’t want to distract anyone, wanted to be appreciated for his brains only.  And he was.  Go, Pythagoras.

Sometimes devils wear an angel’s face.  Cause they’re tricksters, see.  They would turn it all round on you in a jiffy.  Don’t be fooled by cherubs, they’re full of it.  Stick them on the tree and forget about them.  Fairy lights make it all look pretty anyway.

But you’re right, of course, the reverse is also true.  Some fiends are angels hidden.  To smoke out the legit devils.  Traitorous in a good way.  Just look what happened to Snape.  Some revelations are posthumous.  It’s the riddler’s dark joke.  

And isn’t it true that humdrum is happiness after a Kansas whirlwind of upside-down?  You couldn’t write a typical verse after that ever again.  Then some days, you’d release firecrackers into the open air of the yawning plains just to add some freak normal to your humdrum, cause twisters were your normal for so long.

^{_{© N Nazir 2022}}

Written for Shay’s Word Garden, where we are given inspiration with a word list taken from lyrics of songs by The Smiths. Words used: devil, joke, humdrum, typical, verse.

There are so many Smiths and Morrissey songs I love but I’ve listened to them a bit too much over the years that I can’t any more. But here’s one I enjoyed revisiting today. I’m Not Sorry from Morrissey’s 2005 You are the Quarry album. It’s a great live version, I just love it. May you lend it your ears awhile.