Chortling More than the Birds

Tags

Blundering, Florida, Grins, Humor, Inspiration, Laughter, Light, Mistakes, Nature, Peace, Photography

Mirth at one’s own ridiculousness is a phenomenon I highly value. If I was unable to utter even the minutest chuckle at my own ineptitudes, a dour and dismal life I would lead. Grateful I am, thus, that I do not vise myself with seriousness. I simply accept that I am an unintentional lummox and aquatic baboon most of the time.

I find occasion to laugh at myself multiple moments a day. The inane way I word something, for instance. “Aquatic baboon?” What …? Some shaking of the cranium and some chortles are likely to ensue here.

Another common humiliation I find a bit of hilarity in- my falling habit, intentional or involuntary, no matter.

Sometimes (or often), I decide to take a spill, ardently keen on a particular angle of some “majestic” little scene to snap with the old camera. An individual observes Photographer up, ambulating about one moment; completely flattened, chin kissing the loam, the next. Observer gambols over to assist.

“Are you okay? Oh, you’re photographing something? That’s so nice! What it is?! It must be very interesting to make you crawl around on the ground like that!” cries Observer.

I get up and reply, “I was photographing a twig. Would you like to see it?”

And the preposterousness never ends there. A new acquaintance and I will be enjoying a most lovely conversation about a little snowy-white bird with a long, curved bill known as an ibis.

“It’s so cool,” he says licking his lips and looking to the right, picturing the dainty blue-eyed, crimson-billed bird in his mind, “how they sometimes hang out in huge groups, it’s like, so awesome, and they are so social, ya know?”

Here, I become excited, and what bugles from my thin lips is a habitual phrase I never become free of, “MOST indubitably!”

Eyes become glazed, body stiffens. Not mine, his. Every blasted time, the individual to suffer the onslaught of “indubitably phrase” disturbingly believes I have suddenly lapsed into a posh, stuffy, insipid, vodka-drinking-rich-old-lady type of superiority. Oh dear.

So, instead of sitting there mindlessly cackling, I decide to try and come to my own assistance, for social reasons, after all, “Yes, it is just fabulous! Is it not grand, too, when they emit those uncanny honks as they squabble about for a bit of crust? They must be the cutest birds on the planet!” Here, polite laughter should follow. (Why does that still sound like an insipid, vodka-guzzling snob?)

So, reader, you may be convinced now that the author is quite a sea of incessant.

Incessant blunders, I mean.

Just look at the wreckage of the way this post has been written. I think this may be the most annoying thing I have ever crafted. Ah, but at least I am grateful. I rather like this daily entertainment, whether it is the way I talk in an aggravating nameless accent from nowhere (people always inquire what country, what planet…), or my constant losing of hats, glasses, ties and phones, there will always abide my inner peace. Better to Accept, with great bowls of guffaws, I think, than to self-berate, always in fear of lurking mortification.

(Great bowls of guffaws?)

Many good cheers,

Autumn Jade

In Withered Grey

Tags

Black and White, Florida, Macro, Nature, Palm Bay, Photography, Poetry, Rain, Still Life

In the withered grey,

Jets howling, cars grinding by,

Just beyond these trees.

Dragonfly dips low

In a fog of mosquitoes-

Sluicing Rains alight.

Bright orbs of silver

Shine as sunset dissolves cloud-

Prickly Pear donning diamonds,

Lambent in gloaming.

Air Like Still Water

Tags

Abstract, Black and White, Cocoa Village, Experimental Photography, Florida, Night Photography, Poetry

Stops to light a fag,

Shift ended, eyes merged with night-

Air like still water.

Bars groan with guitar.

Listening, her fingers flick.

Sizzles on her sole.

Stirred, she turns and clomps away.

Streets echo the sound.

From a fissure in the brick,

Gecko emerges,

Finally alone.

Sir

Tags

Black and White, Photography, Portrait

Pools of Melancholy

Tags

Age, Black and White, Cocoa Village, Discovery, Florida, Gutter, Introspection, Melancholy, Ocean, Photography, Rain, Sea, Street, Youth

I was born a crabby, old man, the biting brush of early autumn a perfect match for this newborn and decrepit soul. Memories of moldered monochrome, thoughts as rugged and harsh as the fissured bark of the ancient oak trees, and a flare for donning the old checkered highland’s cap and an un-fused pipe redolent of walnut tobacco; such was I since the day I first cast these miry eyes unto the unwary world. I found beauty in the withered, poetry in the dead, and my soul in the smooth ripples slipping across those Sepia Pools of Melancholy.

I was born a cantankerous old man, limping along, nefarious, sometimes with a varnished cane, sometimes alone, snarling with a whirling eye of billiard white at any passerby that might happen near. I had crooked teeth to accent trench coats and London Town hats still redolent of acrid cigars. When I flashed those serrated masticators with all my fury, even the bravest squirrels darted for safer ground. What passion I had for instilling terror in my gnarly ways, askew, stomping along those vacant, black and white streets veined with sniveling cracks.

But somewhere along this old man’s crawl through this spare score and some years, I found my way to the ocean, and there, upon that strumming shore, I discovered acoustic melody, and new forms of poetry, and along the swash zone of shattered scallop shells glinting pink and lavender, the waves encasing this craggy visage with the sweet kiss of brine, I became young for the first time.

Buddha of the Street

Tags

Black and White, Cocoa Village, Despair, Flower, Love, Pain, Photography, Poetry, Society, Street Photography, Violence

Love is disguised through a screen of malevolent taunting,

And shown through Violence, the Buddha of the Street.

Don it on our faces, gnarled like twisted trees,

Snarling eyes that only smile while bleeding.

Euphoria, as skulls crack against the pavement,

Words of spitting teeth, “This is the real life of honour.”

And I believed that was the only time we could feel…

anything at all…

Pray for Shade

Tags

B&W, Floral, Florida, Flower, Heat, Light & Shadow, Nature, Palms, Peace, Photography, Poetry, Quiet, Reticent, Shade, Shadows, Stucco, Sunlight

‘Neath the lissome palms, or in the cool of verdant glade,

Crawling under spotted umbrellas, lumbering in the frescade;

Any coy relief, summer’s inhabitants quietly retreat-

Summer Sun, where even smiling flowers pray for shade.

The Wilde Ocean

Tags

Dog, Florida, Inspiration, Love, Ocean, Photography, Pipe, Selfishness, Surf, Surfer, Waves

The following quotations are from Oscar Wilde.

“Selfishness is not living as one wishes to live, it is asking others to live as one wishes to live.”

A glorious day of impressive waves at Sebastian Inlet, Florida.

“To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all.”

These darlings were barreling down with 12-16 ft walls. Days like these, I also feel in tune with Mr. Wilde about procrastination- why procrastinate until the morrow, when it can be left ’till the day after?

 

“You don’t love someone for their looks, or their clothes, or for their fancy car, but because they sing a song only you can hear.”

Permafrost Voice

Tags

Caged, Cruel, Dark, Despair, Mannequin, Night Photography, Poetry, Sarcasm, Window Display

A permafrost voice that clicks right into place-

A sundering return, with flashy indifference,

“I can open the door myself!” “No receipt!”

(fuck you, fuck you all…I’m as hard as fuck).

Cruelty is a fashion, like cigarettes or checkered socks.

How fragile and vulnerable you seem to me,

Animal seized behind those gelid metal bars.

Once, you knew of oneric hopes and vital energy,

How to grasp for the heavens and pull down the clouds.

Once you knew…now trapped somewhere inside, it screams,

And I can still hear it through that gun-metal-cocking voice,

An affecting cry so smothered and criminally unheard by most-

Like the brushing sound of a seedling as it pushes through the soil.

In Listless Night of Man-Made Stars

In listless night of man-made stars

She dons the cloak of decadence,

Of coruscating baubles and silky threads

To obscure her trembling diffidence.

Sequins and tinsel distracting from despair.

Sibilant retorts and razor-blade sarcasm,

These words of lightning her desperate refuge,

Attempting to disguise her quaking voice.

Gelid, she scrapes along this arena of dissonance-

Of caterwauling flowers and butterflies of stainless steel-

Though sanded Face of Wood reveals no emotion,

It is a cruel mistake to assume she does not feel.

-Autumn Jade