TRIVIA

                                    Getting To Know You

Hi, Carl! Nice to meet you. So you write software for testing industrial rivets? Interesting  job that sounds. And what do you do when you’re not at work?  You know, in your spare time. Hobbies, that sort of thing. 

I haunt a certain Arabian spring, to waylay an incautious jinn;

Hoping to beguile him with an amulet of fire.

Once snared, I bridle-fasten him with starry fetters;

Then, where heaven’s mirage hangs horizon-low,

We ride along the borderlands of dawn,

Scattering the desert clouds that herald day.

Mmm. You like to spend 'quality' time with your family, you enjoy sport and you play a bit of football. Oh, I see – you prefer to watch football on TV? Pretty busy with your job of course. Don’t have much time after work. No, I suppose not. 

Through windy halls I roam, past Teuton temples, challenging the joust with magic Norsemen, 

Blood glittering in the skull’s eye, vanquished voices roaring in the storm;

While in the dark empyrean beyond the horned god’s gaze, an alabaster chariot waits at my command

 To bear me to that cloudy megalith that is the victor’s throne. 

Right. I see. And what about your weekends? You usually go shopping with your wife? And she does aerobics on Thursday evenings? Great. That must keep her fit. 

 With Man Ray and Cocteau, once, I cycled down ecstatic lanes;

We never moved; the summer day flew round us on a wheel of life

Shuddering into blackness when the mechanism stopped;

Now we lie frozen in eternal frames of memory   

Hearing velvet grow behind the sun,

Hearing dragonflies jangle in the lost noon, 
Hearing the dark cloud growing, glowing,

Against the curdling magic sunset. 

Oh, you’re insulating the roof of your house at the moment? Really? All by yourself. That must be quite a job! But it’s great to do a bit of DIY sometimes, isn’t it, and it saves money of course.  

At dusk, lying in a cosmic orchard, I crane to read the neon lights of Orion,

A thin star sign rising over sapphire hills far away;

Here trees sprout planets and moons grow in the rotting depths of the lily pond,

Ice rays burn down to meadows where atomic factories tumble,

And see there, beyond, a man-god rises, glowing, from the corn. 

That’s super and really interesting, Carl. Do you like tea or coffee?