By Prospero Dae
You’re desperate for work. You take a night school course. You’re on the bomb squad now.
You get the call. On scene you identify the device. You have three minutes to defuse this puppy. You open the casing. Some old woman faints. Dumb bystander. No control.
Your superior has given you the deactivation code. You hate the geezer because he’s been ogling your trashy wife for days. Still, you’re a consummate professional.
Another bystander faints. You rehearse the code: 6275, but here’s the catch—you’re dyslexic. One minute left. You’ll try 2657.
You type, carefully. Kaboom—a long, dark, studious night.
Ah..night school, the dark school where it all becomes easy, the problem(s) solved, and one holds all in the palm of one’s hand until poof! (or kaboom) the idiot factor hits and all is lost in a flash….daylight comes and all is lost irretrievably.
Fainting bystanders provide a particularly charming and distracting touch.
Of course this is a metaphor for the poet in society. You gotta be tough to be a poet, the same toughness required to be a bomb specialist. Naturally the non-poets among us faint at the least bit of drama or the slightest tint of existential turmoil, which brings me to this: being on the bomb squad requires one to have the blood of a poet. But, as you can see (and hear) poets are not infallible. One small mistake and it’s curtains–a damask of dark oblivion.
If you feel this is all tongue-in-cheek, you will rightly conclude that this is simply the story of some loser (with a dishy wife) who has one foot on a roller skate and the other on a banana peel (paraphrased from Terrence Malick’s Days of Heaven).
Days of heaven…I remember those…only a film now, shot at the magic hour—late evening,—in the gloaming, when the light is just so….
That’s when poets were still making films. The music by Ennio Morricone is also glorious.
Morricone…poet…synonymous….I say as I have just been listening to Gabriel’s Oboe.