Shuffle Court

I seem to only write when I’m sad. It’s an outlet, or an inlet that lets things flow out. It’s like talking to yourself, but taking the effort to define all those thoughts in black and white. If you decide to share, it’s like talking without listening. To what avail? The unselfishness of sharing may be defeated by the selfishness of speaking.

A fragment is considered err by the laws of language. I consider grammar to be vanity at some degree...man made rules. Does it really matter, the fork, the spoon, the knife…how they lay? The name of the color forces a meaningless opinion and jades the eye. Thought has no boundary; therefore illustration of thought must have no restriction. Rules only become a line of reference for understanding. My sentence short of a subject or verb is correct. My thoughts are as such…disjointed. Short. Strange? 

As writing is an illustration of thought, pictures are an illustration of reality. Both are reminiscent of the past. Whatever is read now in words was thought in the past, and whatever photograph seen today was taken yesterday. Everything we read and see in saved form is looking back. Eventually all will turn to fossil, whether buried in the ground or stored in the network cloud. Truth in full essence only exists in the passing moment. What becomes of the truth after its initial raw expression and what is gained from study of the fossil, is left to the unguided imagination of another generation. The future can never be known, but neither will the past be recalled without mistake. Perhaps memories are better left to memory…and memory is meant to fade. What is forgotten can never be wrong, and what is lost makes room for the future.

Enough fruitless philosophy. After listening to The Gambler by Kenny Rogers, I unexpectedly played poker for the first time in years…and lost. I folded with the right hand and bet with the wrong hand. Metaphors aside, I regained my heart…worth more than any plastic chips or gold coins. I found hope in another hopeless romantic. Two negatives make a positive in algebra, but do those rules apply between people? Does hopeless + hopeless = hope? Or am I just crazy? The latter sounds less crazy. In the words from a song I quoted before by Trace Adkins, “forget mathematical equations”.

Since it’s the last day of national poetry month (or was when I wrote this) and I’m still a hopeless romantic (my algebraic metaphorical equation failed), let me share another chopped up less than stellar set of rhyming thoughts that never went anywhere. This was at first inspired years ago by a stranger which I never met and evolved into a dedication for my friends getting married at the oldest operational set of shuffleboard courts in the world. Don’t ask how I plan on proposing. People have tried, but that secret is reserved indefinitely. And regardless of chemistry or math, hope is never really lost in my world.

So here we stand
On these courts
Shuffleboard
A game of sorts

Ninety years
Slid history
That won’t change
You or me

From far across
I caught your eye
Right there below
The string lit sky

Circles collide
Chitter chatter
Time sits still
No more matter
 
Don’t push heavy
Or be so slight
Chalkboard is clean
No score tonight

Stay off the line
No room for doubt
Cause it's all in
Or it's all out

Strange folk will try
So hard to block
Knock us around
Tic tock tic tock

No end in sight
It’s just the start
To share a life
Without part