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Sichuan Earthquake

God, where are you?

The world has broken and

I am surrounded by death,

It could have been me

And I am so ashamed

I’m here when young lives

They were lives once

Are lying in the broken world

Still like eggs in the market

When snow fills the roof

Bringing it to the ground

Burma Flood

Gods upstairs fighting

crashing and throwing

buckets of water

banging the pails

shaking trees like

rice in a winnow bowl

then the world filled with water

houses drowned and we ran

without hills to help us

no Gods put hills here

our houses were too low

so my daughter drowned

my wife was swept away

she didn’t come back

I am waiting for

government gods in Yangon

to undo the work

of the gods upstairs

but they have not come

my neighbour has the

bad shit another flood

and her body will be

a dry husk of rice

to be planted

never to grow again

Once I thought I could make more slime than anyone in the world. When I was a teenager I had hay fever from plants and house dust and worst of all book dust though I loved books. I spent days sitting in class blowing my nose. I produced litres of, let’s call it slime but you know what I mean. I was really embarrassed by it. There’s a creature that lives at the very bottom of the oceans that makes my slime producing ability look as small as David must have looked to Goliath. It’s called the Hagfish.

We can easily get a horrible picture of the Hagfish in our minds. It is long like an eel or a snake and can twist around really well because it has got no bones. Hagfish eat the dead bodies of other fish that die and sink to the bottom. Eew! Can you imagine a group of hagfish eating a dead whale or even a person who is buried at sea? Not a nice picture. Another habit of hagfish that we find very unpleasant is that they often eat a carcass from inside it. They get in through the mouth or some other opening. Very few people have seen hagfish in their natural home as it is too deep for divers unless they are in a special deep water vehicle. Some of the people who have seen them saw a dead creature looking as if it was alive. It seemed to be wriggling and bulging. After a while they realized it was full of hagfish moving inside it. Yuck!

I can imagine a really scary movie about hagfish that are affected by chemicals or radiation and start chasing swimmers. Even Jaws wouldn’t be as terrifying. In the movie they would be pretty long but the biggest kinds are not much over a metre long and most are little squiggly things. Let us remember that everything on this planet has its place and it is actually quite wonderful that hagfish can exist and live at the bottom of the oceans where it is freezing cold and really, really dark and most creatures would die from the pressure. Well the places most hagfish live are so deep there isn’t much light there anyway so it uses other senses so well it wouldn’t be concerned about being blind at all, so they have no real eyes.

Remember my hay fever? Why did I tell you about that? It is because the strangest thing of all about the hagfish is that it can make more slime than any other creature. It has slime glands all over its body. The hagfish can ooze slime out so fast that if another fish tries to eat the hagfish it can choke on the slime. Well, at least the slime can clog the gills which are the part of the fish that let it breathe under water. In fact, I can really sympathise with hagfish because its slime can be so thick it coats the creature all over and it is probably the only fish that has learned to sneeze to get rid of it all. The other crazy thing a hagfish does to get its own slime off it is tie itself in a knot and then slip the knot all down it to scrape away the slime. For me, slime was an embarrassment, but for the hagfish it is the most amazing protection and maybe it also helps it to slip around inside a dead thing it is eating from the inside.

You’re not going to believe this. Wait for it. Scientists are trying to find ways of using hagfish slime to help people. They are wondering about using it in cooking instead of the white bits of eggs. A meringue is a kind of cake made with a lot of egg white mixed with sugar. Can you imagine walking in your favourite cake shop one day and buying a Hagfish Meringue, or even worse, a Slime Meringue!. They would have to invent a more attractive name, like Mermaid’s Meringue. There are some ideas about it being used in medicine to clog up bits of people that are bleeding and make the bleeding stop.

Now I’ve told you, you can go and tell all your friends about one of the yuckiest creatures on the planet but in the end I would be really happy if you tell them that even the hagfish is special and its slime is a special ability. They won’t believe you when you tell them about it but when someone makes the Movies, ‘Hagfish’, ‘Hagfish 2′ and the rest, you can say, ‘I told you so.’

Hugh stumbled out of the bedroom, drawn toward the kitchen by a savory smell that should not have been there.

‘Good morning,’ said a bright voice and he stared into his medium sized cooking pot where a tiny person had just popped its head above the boiling water to greet him. ‘I am Dumpling Dubya the Jiaozi Fairy and I have just made you breakfast.’

Hugh couldn’t think how to reply. He was never very bright in the morning, so he just said, ‘Why are you green?’

‘I’m a qing cai,’ came the answer. ‘Have some dumplings.’

Hugh grabbed a pair of chopsticks and took the first steaming hot dumpling from the bowl now on the small wooden table.

Wait! The vinegar,’ and a small trickling sound accompanied a brown stream of the best jiaozi cu into the bowl. Wonderful!

‘Thanks.’

‘Don’t thank me, we’re friends.’

‘Good.’

Glossary: jiaozi  pron.jow zi. Chinese savoury dumplings, delicious parcels of flour batter around a meat, vegetabel or mixed filling, served hot with vinegar.

cu difficult for Westerners to pronounce. The c is a cross between t and s, said at the same time. cu is vinegar.

xing cai  pron. x varies from sh to s followed by y, so shing or sying, c as above ai as in tie. Closest to shing tie, a vegetable tasty in dumplings.   qing cai (corrected) Q is pronounced ch, as in chip or chook. Thanks for the correction BMW.

Here are the last two pieces of whimsical fun I had, attempting to win the Bulwer-Lytton competition for bad fiction. I really enjoyed writing them and I hope you really enjoy reading them. Why aren’t they bad enough to win? Oh well. I just have to accept it. (sigh)

Adventure

Suspended over a thousand-foot drop to a tomato-sauce landing on a tablecloth of rock he struggled to maintain focus, feeling the sweat on his hands, not daring to look up to where nimble as a monkey she led the ascent, and he promised himself that if he ever got out of this alive he would never agree to go naked mountain climbing with her again.

Children’s Literature

Who’s the scaredy-cat?” said the Dragon to Pussilanimity-Jane in his fiercest voice and she broke out into such a fusillade of weeping and sobbing and screaming and screeching that he finally exploded in a ball of fire in a distant corner of the cave, which is when she rang the boys on her mobile and told them to come and get the treasure.

I watched our shadow last night

     slowly slide across the moon

                proving our existence

I feared for the moon

    subject to my power to cast shadows