pox

The new style is on hold today, I’m afraid. Much as I would like to serve up a beautiful example of trochaic tetrameter extolling the virtues of various running spots across Melbourne, I’m afraid it can’t be done.

“Why,” you ask? Well, mainly for one reason:

I’ve been gripped by some sort of pox or plague that has made running next to impossible. It’s most difficult to do the daily dozen when your nose is doing a slightly viscous impersonation of Niagara Falls and your chest feels like an acorn being stood on by an elephant.

When I say “elephant” I don’t mean one of those lithe schoolgirl-figured elephants you sometimes see, I mean a big one.

So, I’ve been sick, and in true male style I’ve been a complete sook about it; whining, moaning and generally spreading the love and/or snot around the place.

And I haven’t felt like reading anything serious. I got to the bit in Stephen Fry’s book about poems that are written so that they appear in a diamond shape on the page. I confess at the point I quailed, quaked and mentally did an impression of a Ricki Lake guest:

Enough!!! Talk to the hand, the face don’t wanna know

writ-
-ting a
poem that
looks a groovy
shape is the
stupidest
thing ev-
-er.

It’s the missing link between writing and soduku. Like the other missing link, it’s inarticulate, composed mostly of grunts and, if it had knuckles, would surely drag them along the ground.

A prize for the first person to write in the with the correct, technical name for that sort of poem.