Mucus Fishing
On hot summer days my granddad
would poke at his eyes with
an uncharacteristically garish
green silk hankie.
Asked what he was up to he’d smile
(his mouth at least, never his eyes),
and say,
“Gathering stale tears, my dear.
Too often we forget or neglect to cry
or hold onto our tears and years on,
well, they congeal and you need to
tease them out,”
or something of that ilk.
Like most old folk my grandfather
talked a lot of rot but he was sweet,
had the soul of a poet and the heart,
we learned (too late),
although it came as no surprise,
of a terminally-sad man.
My mother washed the handkerchief.
I was so mad at her.
About the Author: Jim grew up in the heart of Burns Country in Scotland. In fact his first poem was in butchered Scots. Poetry, for him, was about irrelevances—daffodils, vagabonds and babbling brooks—until one day in secondary school the teacher read Larkin’s ‘Mr Bleaney’ and he felt as if the proverbial scales had fallen from his eyes. How could something so… so unpoetic as far as he could tell be poetry? He’s been trying to answer that question for the past fifty years.
Image Credit: Jacopo Guarana “Four Studies of Clasped Hands” Public domain image courtesy of Artvee
As It Ought To Be 