The Word Cloud

Come to me in the night,
my dreams need someone to love,
someone to talk about,
someone to conjure stories about
as I sail my sea of dreams
and float so high above,
my sails now up they catch the eye of the wind.

© 2010 Charles Dennis

http://www.charlesdennis.netne.net

Time seems to shift while our lives progress one eager
step at a time with no control of our path, bounding
forward not knowing, like dancing in the mist.

Moments bursting in no clear direction, random patterns
of  what life brings, there is no destination
while dancing in the mist

Meaningless thoughts invade our brains, leading us to
nowhere, nowhere we’ve been, nowhere we
particularly want to go. Clouded, lost
in wonder, like dancing in the mist.

Time is oscillating, never idle, consistently gaining
ground, yet never catching up.  A constant in where life
begins never telling where life will end as we’re
dancing in the mist.

Our faces moist and ever flush with adventures life
can bring. Adjusting lives with joy and pain, always
giving  always taking back those lives we live
while we’re dancing in the mist.

We can see, and yet have no control of what comes next.
Life dangles what it will, to keep us in its clutches,
as we’re dancing in the mist.

Let us end this circular pattern with its closed loop, and
no way out, the end will come eventually
in death, while dancing in the mist.

http://www.charlesdennis.netne.net

© 2009 Charles Dennis

A crisp, browning leaf caught her eye as it was lifted slowly out of the gutter and softly replaced. As she looked away, it was caught up with a multitude of others and hurled into the air, in a whirlingly, dancingly colourful leaf tornado. The muttering air caught the ends of her long hair and brushed it over her face, catching on her eyelashes, sticking to her lip.

She turned onto a busy, unknown street, with unknown crowds waltzing past one another. The rising breeze creaked a shop sign back and forward, then snatched at her skirt before a half-embarrassed smile and a cautionary hand held it in place. An abrupt gust struck her in the chest, and she was suddenly blinded by ruffling hair as she leant forward into it. A garish crisp packet bowled past her, and a scrap of paper moulded itself purposefully to her shoe before scuffing away.

The wind blew an elemental excitement under her skin.

She walked an experimental strut, and colour was brisked into her cheeks. She noticed a bright red coat, and the rouge-on-blue of the dusking clouds repeatedly lifted her eyes to linger on the sky. Snatches of melody occurred to her, her own soundtrack romancing her down the street as she swung her arms, and noticed the stereotypes in the people who passed her.

She should go anywhere, or do anything. The wind-recklessness stirred her, and she felt alone in the swarms of the ordinary, as if she knew them all but didn’t care for any of them. The trees lining the street tossed around above her and mischievously flung their leaves away, and a mop of a dog strained and yapped urgently on its throttling string.

No-one else seemed to feel the wildness rolling up in her. The same puckered lips and suspicious eyes stamped beside her, the same carefully averted stares; the same frowsy grumpiness walked the street, and gave no indication of secret rashness, or a hidden daring. She skirted past them all, and there were skitters in her chest as she rushed on nowhere.

Nipped from her chaotic self-dreams, an unaverted gaze caught hers. A beautiful man was whipped past her by the winds, and she looked at him fully, with the courageous light of a laugh in her eye.

And...CUT!

The story of how a fake movie executive helped kick-start my very real show-biz career

One of the things I enjoy most about going back to England is the choice of fresh bread available. Over here, there is only one sort of loaf. Its crust is thick and tough, and the bread is hard and often full of holes. Sometimes it is sliced, but often if the power is off, it is sold whole. It never lasts more than a day, before becoming stale. Either that or the ants move in. I will never forget the first time I met my future father-in-law, back in the early ‘90s.

I was staying with my husband-to-be and his parents in my husband’s lakeshore house. That sounds rather grander than it actually was. A modest teacher’s bungalow, with a cold shower and a wood-burning stove, it was run-down and infested with cockroaches.  The cat had died after eating insects, which had been doused in ‘Doom’ (it does what it says on the can), and his pet monkey, Monica, had recently hung herself in a tragic accident with a mosquito net. At that time, my husband was renowned for his poor hygiene; a friend of ours had spent New Year in hospital with severe food poisoning, after sharing Christmas lunch with us.

Anyway, this particular morning, trying to impress the future in-laws, I decided to make toast for breakfast. The wood burner was glowing, and I had pounded some of the slower cockroaches in the cutlery drawer, with the rolling pin, as was the daily custom. I carefully sliced into the new loaf of bread, purchased the day before, and let out a shriek. My father-in-law (to be) was first on the scene. A stocky Welsh retired engineer, he had no time for Southern girly wusses, like me.

‘What on earth’s the matter?’ he said, as I stared open mouthed at the loaf, with the knife raised in the air.

‘A…a…ants,’ I cried, waving the knife.

‘You’re not afraid of a few ants are you, girl?’ he scoffed, pushing me aside. But then he saw the full horror. The entire interior of the loaf had been eaten away by what seemed to be a seething mass of ants. There must have been thousands of the things, and not a crumb in sight.

‘Toast’s off,’ my father-in-law stated, very matter of factly. ‘Got any bacon?’

That was about twenty years ago now, but the memory has stayed with me. Since then, I have encountered ants of all shapes and sizes. Like Eskimos, who have a hundred odd different words to describe snow, my kids have a large vocabulary to describe the many varieties of ants here. Their favourite are the stink ants, which when squished, release a powerful, foul odour. Once, when staying in a rest house by the lake, there were so many ants in our room, that my youngest daughter, then aged about seven, got out of bed in the morning, with her back heaving with them. On the white bed sheet, there was the perfect shape of her body outlined by red ants.

But, to bring me back to the start, yesterday I bought a loaf of bread that amazingly closely resembled any white sliced loaf you might find in supermarkets back in the UK. It could have been a Kingsmill or Mother’s Pride (does that still exist?), and yet I purchased it here in Malawi. It even came packaged in a plastic bag, printed with ingredients and other nutritional information and a best before date. These things are all taken for granted back home, but here nothing is ever sold with any sort of information like use by, or best before. It doesn’t really matter with bread. You know it will only last a day, and can tell, with a squeeze, whether it is fresh or not. But for meat and dairy products, it is so valuable. Around a third of the milk, cream and yoghurts that I buy, I end up having to throw away, as they are off before I get them home. Such basic necessities that we all take for granted, like fridges and freezers, are alien here to most of the population. So, when shop assistants receive a delivery of milk, they do not realise the urgency to refrigerate it. Milk can be left sitting in the midday sun for hours before it is put in the cooler. Since they are unlikely to drink it themselves, with it being priced way out of their reach, they don’t realise how the taste is affected.

So, at last, a sliced loaf that compares with home. In the last few months Malawi seems to have been crawling into the 21^st century. We are now proud to have a proper cinema which shows real films (not just the badly dubbed ninja rubbish), albeit a few months late. We just saw Disney’s ‘A Christmas Carol’. Our first fast food burger restaurant, owned by a South African chain, opened last week. Not quite MacDonalds, (are we the only country in the world not to have a MacDonalds?) and not very fast, but that’s a whole other story. For now, I am enjoying my loaf of bread, which really is the best thing since sliced bread.   

An unspoken rule has been followed by all members of my household for such a long time, yet never has it been discussed between us. When the news first hit it was as lightning, I was shocked into silence and self-reflection.

Me: 'Why are the police here? Where is Alice?'
Dad: 'They found her wandering in the traffic, something happened.'
Me: 'What?! Did a car hit her, is she alright?!'
Dad: 'No, nothing like that...she got into a vehicle with three men, they took her to their house against her will.'
Me: 'What. No. What did they do to her?'
Dad: 'Everything.'

But now, less lightning-like it festers as a poison below the very foundations of this once-amiable family, slowly eating away at all of us. But each and every action has a reaction, this surreally cruel situation was to get harder to deal with. I awoke on the 1st of August, 2008 to find my sister unconscious outside my bedroom door, an empty bottle of sleeping pills lay beside her head. The weeks that followed saw us going through a phase of removing all knives, and hiding all our medication. This stopped when we realised that if she wanted to, she could end her life at any time on her way to school. So why bother?

Since that day, she has been rushed to the hospital for multiple attempts at taking her own life every couple months.

As her older brother, this destroys me. I should be helping, but aside from holding her hand while she's unconscious and calling for yet another ambulance, I don't know what to do. We're hoping that maybe if we just don't talk about what happened, the abhorrent deed along with its after-effects may slither away, far out of reach of any of our memories, leaving us in peace. But, deep down we know and accept that this will never be the case. What was done cannot be "un-done". We're stuck with the dice that were rolled for us. Forced to keep it here in our house and mind, as if the memory of it has become a permanent member of our family. Until the very last of our hearts stops beating, this repulsive monster will not leave our world. 

Time has shown me that discussing such an act only makes my melancholy worse, unloading my burdens onto others simply isn't fair. There seems to be no clear way out of this. So perhaps, if we continue to avoid discussion and deny it any place on our lips for long enough, we may one day be set free from the tyranny of the situation we are trapped to live under...That's the silent-hope we share here, anyway. 

Yet still, I cannot help but catch myself wondering; how long will it be until sirens can be heard outside my house again? And why will we not solve this now, before they are even given reason to start - why do we do nothing but wait?

Dawn's pale first light,
A glowing farewell to night.
Petals tumble free,
Like perfumed rain, from a cherry tree.
Salty ocean spray,
Misting my face on a stormy day.
Dappled light green,
Through a forest canopy.
Warm scented grass
Slope, beneath a sun of brass.
Orchestra tunes,
Dischorded notes like summer's bloom.
Orange-streaked sun set,
Burning into darkness's dept.

Each breath of these,
Our loves like a zephyr breeze,
Is just as pure
And miraculous a cure,
For any tear,
Or sigh or gloom fallen here,
As the beauties,
That shine so brightly in minds,
So still feel blessed,
Despite pain and times distressed.
Seek and you'll find,
Seven sights to heal the mind.

the worlds hardest game

idiot test

What's your favourite fish? Enjoy.





Confined below water, the fish become fodder,
Trapped under the seas, to be food for me,
Destined to breathe the oceans full of debris,
Polluted.
Only food for me, for no one else.

Covered with scales, this defense fails,
The tools of man destroy, the weakened koi,
And the fish I retrieve from my ocean farm,
Poisoned.
Only to hurt me, and no one else.

 Twelve robots water the flowers in our front garden. They measure out exactly how much water each particular patch of dirt requires in order to gain maximum productivity out of the land.

However, it soon begins to rain heavily and this messes everything up. Some of the robots begin to cuss and splutter about, furious at Mother Nature for pissing on their coldly calculated work. Some of them wander off, neither angry nor distressed over their last hour of work being made redundant. Some start to cry, and wallow in their own self pity.

The last of the robots, however, decides to take things into his own hands. He decides to activate his "Destruction" mode, and twin-linked auto-cannons sprout from each of his shoulders, he then proceeds to exclaim the phrase "KILL, MAIM, BURN!" and parades around the garden threatening the other robots and passing neighbours.

This could turn nasty, fast. What is your course of action? Answer in the comment section below!