Christmas was cold a silly piece for Xmas

Christmas Was Cold

Christmas Was Cold ©

By Michael Casey

Christmas was cold, and Kevin did not like it, he didn’t like it one bit. The agency had said they had a job for him , it was a temp job and it involved a lot of travel, and it paid well, very well.

So Kevin took it like a shot, he’d been unemployed for a while and he wanted to bring some money in so he could go on holiday to someplace anyplace warm. They had said he’d get a free holiday as part of the package IF he took the job.

He arrived at the port and went into a warehouse, he’d be interviewed in there said the agency. He looked all around and he could see nobody, nobody at all. Then he heard the sound of boots echoing behind him, he spun around to see and elf approaching. He laughed, the man in the costume looked so silly.

Only it wasn’t a man in a costume, it was a real elf, only Kevin was too stupid to realise it. He’d never seen a real elf in his life. The elf looked Kevin up and down, he half smiled. Kevin was fat, very fat, the kind of fat where his belly was bursting his belt, it wasn’t overhanging his belt, that would have been disgusting. No Kevin was fat, perfect fat, for the perfect job.

The elf asked him did he know why he was here, and did he have his passport with him, the usual stuff when you apply for a job nowadays. The elf walked away with Kevin’s documentation in his hand.  Kevin looked around the warehouse it was empty, full of nothing.

Full of nothing as far as stupid people could see, if Kevin could use his eyes then he’d see that the warehouse was brimming with people and every kind of thing. This was Christmas warehouse. The elf returned holding a Santa suit in his hand, Kevin laughed, so that was the job, Santa at a store. Well he needed the money so he put the suit on.

Kevin felt dizzy, he had to lean on the elf for support, he had stars in his eyes, he was seeing things. The elf took a glass of water out of his pocket and Kevin drunk it willingly. Noise and fireworks appeared in the empty warehouse. Kevin fainted.

Kevin awoke in another world, in Santa’s world, now he could see that he was in Santa’s workshop, there were elves everywhere. He must have been drugged, he rubbed his eyes and felt his face. He had a beard, a long white beard. He’d been drugged and transformed into Santa, suit and all.

The elf explained, that only a man with a perfect belly could stand in for Santa at Christmas. Kevin was the chosen one, he was the man, he was Santa. The real Santa had broken his leg while skiing in Birmingham, so Kevin was the standin.

The elf went through the Health and Safety rules, HO HO HO, always 3 HO HO HOs, other than that there were no Health and Safety rules. The reindeer would explain everything. Kevin looked around he could see no reindeer, the elf led him outside to the dock.

A submarine surfaced and the sleigh and the reindeer emerged, reindeer can hold their breath for such a long time.  They are waterproof or seaproof too, the sleigh has water repellent paint on it too, made in the paint factory in Birmingham, you know the one just down the road from the reindeers friends in Ladywood Fire Station.

Kevin was impressed this was more like James Bond, he high fived the reindeer, they licked his new beard, that’s what reindeer always do to Santa. The elf smiled he was sure they’d get on well. The elf answered the unasked question, why the submarine?

The submarine was to get into countries where Santa was not welcome, North Korea was one of them. A sleigh would be spotted on radar, so Santa would sneak in and shower love and happiness and hope amongst the people.

Kevin shed a tear, he was Santa now, so his heart felt the things Santa felt. The submarine levitated and turned/merged into a bigger sleigh, a very large sleigh. Eat your heart out James Bond, Santa has much better toys, literally.

Kevin shook the reins and away they went into the night sky, Kevin ho ho hoed his way around the world. His fat belly was too big to get down a lot of the chimneys, but that’s where the reindeer came in, they formed a team, a tug of war team and pulled him up and down the chimneys.

The reindeer could of course get down all the chimneys, they held their breath and wriggled their bums, it was easy for them they had been doing it for centuries. That’s why your Christmas trees get nibbled in the night, it’s the reindeer, its hungry work flying around the world with Christmas presents.

Kevin, or should I say Santa realised why he needed the beard, it kept him warm, it got cold, very cold flying high in the sky. They did stop on the River Po, just to say hello to Don Camillo, he was a priest but sometimes he was on the naughty list, and sometimes he came off the naughty list, depending on what he and the mayor had been doing.

The sleigh/submarine had a never-ending supply of presents, Kevin, I mean Santa got into the swing of things, the reindeer sung carols, 1000s of them in lots of different languages, they were a carol jukebox. Some brought tears to Santa’s eyes.

Dive, dive, dive they had to sneak into a country to bring Hope and Love, no presents just a loaf of bread. The reindeer didn’t nibble on any trees, as Christmas trees and Christmas itself were banned. The reindeer cried, but there was always Hope.

High and Low, Up and Down the sleigh went over the face of the earth, Santa HO HO Hoed, tonight Christ was born, a new light had entered the world.

The work was done, the world had been crissed and crossed, the reindeer headed back to the warehouse. As the sleigh landed Kevin’s beard dissolved, he was Santa no more. He looked around the warehouse, the elves were dissolving into nothingness, the reindeer trotted away still singing Rejoice Rejoice Emanuel.

Had he been drugged, was this all an hallucination, it couldn’t be he felt Love in his heart, he had been Santa for a night. As he walked out of the warehouse his footsteps echoed into sky, Kevin looked up and could see Santa in his sleight, his crutches besides him, and the reindeer still sung Rejoice Rejoice Emanuel.    

the photos are silly too, so please laugh with me and buy all the books, then I can move house.

https://www.amazon.com/Michael-Casey/e/B00571G0YC 

Pretentious Poets Strike Again

Pretentious Poets Strike Again ©

By Michael Casey

Now how exactly shall we describe Pain, is it just a myth advanced by Pharmacists aided and abetted by slick adverts on tv with wonderful graphics of throbbing this and that. Does it exist at all? Is it just a bad joke on Creation’s part? Shall I compare thee to a Scream on a Winter’s night echoing through The Dark of the Night of he Soul.

Now where did we put the Dictionary, next to our copy of the Perfect Word by Lenny Bruce, the well know American dictionary compiler, the coarse, the very coarse version. Or did we leave it next to our cook book, the American guide to Hamburgers a la Macdonalds, the 1999 version. Though who uses dictionaries, they are for the mentally weak, those with no moral fibre, we poets don’t need them, we just make up new words made up of sounds.

If it sounds good we use it, not forgetting a dose of alliteration on the side, and if we get the words wrong there is always the doctor or the priest to absolve us from our word choice. Priests are so forgiving of our words, especially Fr. Percy, he used to be a nudist till he saw the light and became a poet and then finally a priest, in the church of the Church of the Totally Gullible the church of Film Stars and Pop Stars.

But I digress, which word shall I pick and choose, where is my Muse, it’s hard to keep your muse, it should be chained to your bed, or was that a bad idea I saw on Blacklist, I really must stop watching late night tv, or was it the Brussel sprouts I consumed. We poets don’t eat we consume, and are consumed by ideas and emotions, because we are so sensitive, as we are Artists who teach the whole world what is Nature in the atmosphere and deep deep deep down inside us.  

I found the dictionary in the bathroom, its such consuming reading while one is at repose, or just sat on the toilet. Sadly a few pages are missing, I ran out of tissue paper, the letter Z has all but disappeared. But Z is so boring so it shall not be missed by this Poet, nor the world of words, how many zebras have you heard of in contemporary poetry. Not even Leonard Cohen used Z, so it won’t be mourned, he will be mourned, but Z will not.

So where were we, yes we were describing Pain, rather like a Rolling Stones concert where there is a 400 years queue for the toilet, now that is pain as one hops from leg to leg crossed leg to crossed leg, like a frog in a kilt, and no I’m not talking about that French Fashion person, whose name evades me right now, though he does make rather good perfume in the torso bottle. I’m almost inspired to write a ditty about queueing to have a sh sh well  you know what I mean, so long as its clean.

  

Now I was going to talk about how clever my choice of words is, but that would be boastful, but I am a pretentious poet, so I DO need to Educate you, there are more letters in the alphabet other than Z after all. In the Fall the leaves fall  and gather on the ground for walkers to walk in and squash and squish, rather like pages stolen from a dictionary never to be used again, its all such desolation, how can poets survive with no cheap alliteration to be found in the leaves, Nature itself thieves them from our life from our very being.

So Pretentiousness must end the pain killers have worked and its 5.30am now so I need to go back to bed to finish my repose, this stink of words must have gone up your nose or fallen down and left a mess on your pjs or dressing gown, amongst the tooth paste stains and hot chocolate stains. So goodnight to one and all, as the good Earth spins I have finished blowing my own Trumpet, another night owl is reading my words, its 3am somewhere and I hope he enjoys my prose brought on by lack of repose. And if He wants to give everybody a great Christmas Present, how about lowering the cost of pills, then he would be a saviour for all our ills.

Imagination is Always Better than Knowledge, Really

Imagination is Always Better than Knowledge, Really? ©

By Michael Casey

I wrote something and when I read back the finished piece I wondered how I’d managed to write it. This happens frequently, I read back my latest piece and I’m not just pleased but slightly amazed where the words came from. Everything is in the soup as I’ve said before and I just ladle out the words, like a dinner lady. Or perhaps like a painter with a blindfold on, who only sees the final result when the blindfold is removed, that would explain a lot about Picasso’s work.

So I wondered was there a fancy word for it, a kind of word serendipity, I did a quick google and the best I could find was the idea that Imagination is better than Knowledge. So you would imagine that knowing stuff trumped everything else, I’m seeing the verbs I’m using just as you are and I’m seeing the potential for comedy straight away. Trump will always be a comedy word now, well at least for 4 years or until Trump gets bored and leaves the job via a Tweet.

So if you have Knowledge then you should always be smarter than the next guy because you know all there is to know, whatever you are doing, see the verb “doing” can be used and misused in a variety of ways. It just depends on your Imagination, if you have ever read my Lenny Bruce piece then you will know what I’m on about, and if you haven’t then you’ll just have to make an obscene photo call to Dustin Hoffman and if you can put on a Tootsie voice HE may explain it to you. But don’t ask him why a guy so short can be so full of, so full of such big performances, be careful how you pronounce performances or he’ll scream back in his Lenny Bruce voice, and tell you to go Blah a Blah, which is a disgusting thing to say to anybody at Christmas.

Knowledge informs your choices and by using knowledge you’ll find the solution to anything. A doctor or a car mechanic follows a path, a yes or a no path until they either fix your car or work out what ails you. Though never get your mechanic or doctor mixed up as you wouldn’t want a mechanic giving you an “oil change”, in place of your Proctologist, I’ll leave it to your imagination. It does prove the point though about Knowledge being important, especially so when the right person is in the right job.

But what of Imagination? If you present all the information to specialist you’ll get a reasonable answer because they have Knowledge, but the guy with imagination he produce a work of art or an escape route. If you are trapped in a room how do you get out?You pile all the books together and use them to create steps so you can escape. Or you all take you clothes off to make a rope that’ll help you escape, this one is worth remembering if somebody is in a lake drowning or has fallen through ice, a human chain or a rope made from clothes can and will and has saved lives. Though it might just be a prank to put on UTube, or a way to see you all near naked.

I think this revelation about Imagination trumping Knowledge should be passed to our kids immediately, tonight when you put your kids to bed or when they come home drunk from the office Christmas Party, whatever age they are, tell them you love them, as you wipe the sick away and hold their clothes at arms length as you put them in washing machine. It will give them hope for the future and besides from the really clever people I’ve met they may have knowledge but they lack common sense, or imagination, clever but dull.  

Homecomings or why we feel glad

Homecomings or why we feel glad ©

By Michael Casey

I’m so glad, I’m glad I’m glad I’m glad sings Cream on one of their tracks, they are just so glad. Things can make us us glad, silly little things. A couple of hours ago my brother turned up on our doorstep, it was unexpected and unannounced, he doesn’t live in Birmingham he lives near London, so its always nice to see him on one of his flying visits. We were very close as kids and it was on one of his flying visits that her was there when mum was dead in his arms as he tried CPR, and then 8 weeks later on another flying visit he was there and he saved dad’s life with CPR on the bedroom floor, its all in Padre Pio and Me which is on the Internet.

So you can see I’m always happy to see my brother, without him I would not have been invaded by the Shanghai girls. Things in all our lives are signposts to the future and are lanterns from the past that guide us back to happy memories. Me and my brother used to be altar boys together, as Fr Brain used to say I was Sancho Panza to his Don Quixote, Fr Brain is now Bishop Brain. We all feel glad because of shared memories, whether it was stealing the lead off the church roof, or serving Mass in the church below. Though some might say the thieves on the roof were closer to God, technically if not spiritually, though if they fall off the roof then they would have definitely been with God.

So memories bring us home to our past, to lives lost, and wives won, a memory is a hope that changed or morphed into something else. I can look at the sloped wall of the old Lloyds bank and remember pushing DMC off the wall and making him cry, though he insisted he only cried 25%, the memory makes me smile after 50years. Though a certain person did persuade me to hold a banger in my hand while he lit it, if I did that today I’m be armless, it was not a harmless activity. Now I can look back and smile at my only stupidity. A memory is a homecoming to our own past self, to our own naive younger self, but its always god to feel young and innocent before growing up gets in the way.

She’ll be coming round the mountain when she comes, singing ai ai yipee ai eh , is a song we sang in primary school at the Christmas party, you’ll have to grab a primary school teacher to see if I got the words right. I’m sure if you ask parents they’ll all smile because it reminds them when they were young and innocent with no mortgages nor bills, just a pocket full of sweets with a snotty handkerchief on top.

Going back to Ireland has the same effect on me, as I recognise the landscape, the “Pops” , its 2 mountains together which look like giant breasts on the landscape, that’s what my old Aunty Delia from Killarney used to call them. There’s the beach at Cromane, the old coast guards station and the strand, there are the Lakes of Killarney too, as well as the1000s of acres of forest. These are the things that make me smile and all the memories tumble out. A visual stimulus evokes smiles and laughter and tears. Yes I’m from Birmingham but the Love in me was made in Kerry.

A time and a place is in the stones, in the mountains and in the sand and in the sea, and it is is you and in me. People, all of us have a love for our patch, or spot on this earth, for that corner chair in the bar or at the back of the church. That physical connection is in all of us. That’s what lifts us from the dust from whence we came, maybe that’s why we all buy tacky souvenirs with our favourite place, our home printed on them. But they say that Home is Where the Heart is, and so long as its in our Heart it does not matter where we are on the map, for all roads lead Home.  

The Mirrors on our Walls

The Mirrors on our Walls ©

By

Michael Casey

Well its the Wednesday before Christmas and like everybody else we are double checking when our dustbins will be collected over the holidays. I’ve not even finished my Kenco smooth coffee, yes I know you are all laughing the idea of anything smooth and me, ok, so I was listening to Justin Timberlake’s Mirrors and as I listened a pair of old ladies zoomed past on the pavement, or sidewalk in American.

The old ladies must have been in their 70s, their arms were linked and they had long walk coats on with coloured woollen bonnets on their heads, all protected from this first day of winter as the Google graphic tells us. I got up from my chair to watch them, instantly I knew I had today’s story, and that’s how fast the ideas come. I’m still listening to Timberlake Blue Ocean Floor is the track now, when I heard it for the first time a couple of days ago it made me cry, following the Mirrors track. Ok, I’ll admit it, I’m a big softie, I may look like a retired WWW wrestler but I have feelings.

So we all have mirrors on our walls and mirrors in our life, and they do say if you break a mirror it’s 7years bad luck, so what mirrors in your life, people and places and children pulling faces. When my wife came to live with me I had an enormous mirror placed on the bedroom wall opposite the then empty wardrobe. So to me that mirror represents getting married and having my home invaded by Shanghai girls, first my wife then our first followed by our 2^nd daughter, and finally by a female bilingual cat called Totoro.

A mirror allows you to comb your hair before you leave the house, Dan Dan the desperate man, washed his face in the frying pan, combed his hair with the leg of the chair, is the rhythm I can half remember, you can google it for fun. The point being a mirror allows you to tidy yourself before the rest of the world sees you. Puddles used to serve that purpose but if you were in a dry spell then puddleless led to untidiness, but the invention of mirrors sorted all that.

As for lives, they have mirrors and cracked mirrors, a life is much more complicated than a reflection. The old ladies reminded me of the two old sisters who ran the bakery near our house when I was a child, one was married to a short man who wore a white lab coat all the time, and best of all they also ran a sweet shop too. We called it “OffYouGoes” as she always used to say Off You Go back home to your mum. The sisters were inseparable, only death split them apart. Many years later, maybe 40, the surviving little sister was buying bread at the bread shop near my house. I told the shopkeeper later what a high compliment she had received having this baker use her shop.

I used to see a couple of identically dressed twin sisters on my bus coming home work, forever together, it was near impossible to tell them apart. One day and thereafter, after many years of this sight only one was to be seen. I was afraid to ask what had happened for fear of opening up a wound, or a scar to the heart. They looked like legal secretaries to me, I have worked at a Law Firm in my travels, but I’d never know now. And now I’m at home a hausfrau, so I’d never meet them or one of them again.

Brothers match brothers, they go to the same school, and I don’t mean Eton, they go to the same grammar school in my case, or Casey case if you like.Do you or should you match each other? Major, Minor, Minimus as you are called by Mr Hanney the Latin and Spanish teacher, as he sizes you up from his 5feet zero height, made taller by his Operatic tones and steel heels. You are different from your brothers. And so I was, much heavier and tank like on the rugby field, but with a flair for French as Mr Notzing our French teacher used to say, 20 word test every week for 4 years. Either your were a dullard or you breached 80% because of him and him alone.

You must never try and copy anybody else, you are not a reflection you are yourself and nobody else. My daughter has a friend who copies her all the time, they say imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, but Single White Female is just creepy. So looking directly into camera, Stop IT, I stole that line from Donald, not Trump, O Mac Donald he has a farm just outside Birmingham, you can google it if you don’t believe me. Where I live there was a chicken farm 100 years ago.

Some people assume my daughters are the same, their posh English accents do sound the same to me and my wife and we cannot tell them apart a lot of the time, so God help the rest of you. I believe in the Sinatra way, clear enunciation, then everybody can understand. Don’t pressurise your kids with you brother does this or your sister does this. They are not stuck in a mirror with no way out, that’s Dr Who or a Fairy Tale. Let kids decide for themselves, obvious hide the Stella Artois, just in case the little bastards, sorry little angels, find it, and use it to wash their hair with, that really would ruin your Christmas.

A mirror is a thing of beauty, and not because you are looking at yourself naked flexing your muscles, then you put on your Victoria Secret lingerie. Ok, stop will all the men wearing women’s lingerie put it back in the knickers drawer, its your wife’s Christmas present, its not yours. Your Christmas lingerie is the Marks and Spencer lingerie in the drawer below. I added this paragraph for all the transvestite readers as I like to end with a smile.

To finish as I do have to visit Aldi, as I do every day, remember always look in the mirror when you change, but the greatest change is not what you see in the mirror but what you do in your life. Sadly Michael Jackson sung the song but never followed his own advice. So from this Michael, have a mirror in your life, its the advice you give yourself, or you’ll be like the Emperor and his New Clothes, no matter how often you look in the mirror you’ll always be naked.