Balloons and a parade and shit

They say things happen when you're not looking for them. Falling in love, making a new friend, finding a new opportunity, conceiving a baby. It's not been my experience, in general. Indeed generally I have found that when I am looking for nothing, that is what I get, but this week, while I was busy not looking for it, I crossed that golden threshold of 5000 Vocal reads. Why this is the golden threshold I do not know, only I remember quite some time ago a rash of people I had subscribed to all posting this landmark at a similar time, and thinking how utterly unlikely 5000 reads seemed for me.

But here I am! 5011 to be precise. An average of 4.45 per day of my Vocal membership. Or it was until you read this. Though there's still time to stop, I would encourage you to finish, I have no attachment to the number 5011, I was just reporting it for the sake of accuracy, which it transpires I have intermittent attachment to. I don't know when I crossed the threshold, maybe yesterday, maybe last week, but I felt immediately entitled to write a brief self-congratulatory missive on the subject on discovering it in the rear view mirror.

Or I did until I sat down to do so and the muses led me to the poem that follows. I must apologise in advance for this, I have had a recent density of poor nights more usually experienced by the parents of new-borns and perhaps it is lending me an affinity to the gloom. Now I have squandered the opportunity to be upbeat and make expressions of gratitude and appreciation and indulged myself instead in a bemoanment of the necessities of balance to ensure a swarthier health than a life on my arse and in my head is like to offer. Though not without foundation, please rest assured that I rather favour variety in reality, and this is a more appropriate reflection on my post-graduate studies than my Vocal usage. So before you read my "celebratory" poem, please know that I do genuinely thank you so much for the community I have found here. I am not a confident person, and it is possible that you do not realise what many of your comments on my stories have meant to me. I walk a little taller for your words.

Sometimes. Again, for the sake of accuracy, sometimes I walk a little taller and sometimes I continue to feel like someone should be kind enough to stop me before I embarrass myself. But a little taller sometimes is a big deal for a perennial stooper.

And now to the party. This poem I shall entitle "5000 reads and what have I got to show for it?".

5000 reads and what have I got to show for it?

First it was the obvious

Tendons on the backs of my hands,

Strung between phalanges and through the carpal tunnel

And on, along the ulna,

Until the elbow began to wince,

Convinced it held a racket, or a club

And not the weight of five fervent fingers.

And thumbs, though they only marked the spaces.

Next the muscles of the back

Gave up on the spine,

Which bent under the successive weight of not good enough,

Curving over the belly that cramped and slept and cramped again,

A peristaltic floundering

Hoarding toxicity and calling it succour.

Perhaps, if I had paused to stretch,

My legs would not have wasted,

And my serotonin slathered gut may have gone on working

As it should.

Last, the brain, an after thought,

Winced and cramped, and wasted

And left me wrecked upon the rocks,

Still thirsting for the treasure

I hoped so much to find.