full of awe

Unhinged joy

Exuberant. Elated. Joy. It slips off, that joy. It finds rest on the floor from where it cannot fall further. We'll leave it there for now since we have other things that require our attention. What we may do is push it under the desk with the metal tipped toe of our boot. Later, when we sweep out the place, just before we depart into that good night, we'll scoop it up and dispose of it in the dustbin. We will exube and elate at its good riddance.

I've been reviewing the written word lately on a website called, and it is aptly so called, I feel, writing.com. The customers of the site are dedicated writers, if not all that enthused by reading. This makes sense because otherwise it might have been called reading.com which I imagine is currently a site specific to a village in England. But to return to the reviewing part of the conversation before we get carried away again by these necessary vexations. I've been looking particularly at poetry on the site. Reviewing poems. And I've been overjoyed to discover that there are ways of reviewing and critiquing poems which can be fun. This can only mean that I am unwell, that I should *get that checked out* as my son would say. I should and I will but not for a little while yet.

I had in mind a surgeon, the surgical tools, the excisions and rearrangements, the viscera. The mind of a surgeon. Precise, delicate, discrete. Then I must have thought of the emergency room where the finer sensibilities of our surgeon are overwhelmed. The technician becomes the brawler. The fight has to end and it has to do so right now. Our surgeon comes in, fists flying. No more left jabs, surgical straight rights, it’s all power now, left hooks, right hooks, upper cuts. Defense a distant thing of dead tired clenches in the corners to catch a breath before the next assault. It's blood in the ring and blood in the ER. The hiss and clunk of the crowd, the roar of the cutting machinery. The towel that hurdles the ropes flashes weakly before it collapses on the floor at the ref's still shiny black shoes, a wet rag once white now bruised pink and red. In that corner disheartened resignation, in this one weary victory. The mouthguard tastes like gristle. The patient is...

The mixed metaphor and its invariable extensions become muddled. This is probably, and I've only figured it out at this minute, why writers are discouraged from using them. The tools of the surgeon, the fists of the pugilist. The poem is the patient, but that's as far as it goes. Reviewing a poem should probably not be a boxing match, and who are you fighting with, you over-ambitious, misguided little plastic surgeon? The fat lips, the irretrievable noses, the sweeps, the epicanthic folds, the malleable flesh. One would imagine a delicate touch is required. There is little need for violence. Surely?