Third. A right plight.

“Nothing.” (answer to last)

Writing this blog, I feel in sympathy with Emily Dickinson’s ‘nobody’ –

“I'm nobody! Who are you?
Are you nobody, too?
Then there's a pair of us — don't tell!
They'd banish us, you know.

How dreary to be somebody!
How public, like a frog
To tell your name the livelong day
To an admiring bog!”

…or, as Mr. Frog ’imself might say, “dropping one’s aitches takes the ‘hauteur’ out of ‘auteur’.”

Which means I am, in my solipsism, free to write as I will.

And so, I write, on a similar theme:

The Companion.

At the lake’s edge,
A sudden gust.
Caught among the swirling
Skirts of faded petals -
Breeze of another summer -
The faint scent
Of his deep longing.

The children about his feet,
Hungry for the hundred tales
With which his life was leavened,
Are all his mind.

Courting
The trembling minstrelsy of his fingers,
A parliament of birds
Prodigiously dispute the propriety
Of each fibrous knot of memory
Discarded from the crusty fabric
Of his life - till the tale’s end
Scatters these fickle courtiers
To flock homage
Under the aegis of some other king.
.................................
©Alan Gilliland.

This may not quite be nonsense, but it is the way I am feeling today, and my imaginary companion is understanding of the vagaries of my mind.