This re-worked piece is for this month’s Blog Battle challenge, with the prompt word of ‘proposal’.

Flynn was up early and well gone to his work on the farm, as always. Kate found the envelope on the kitchen table, propped up against the tomato sauce bottle that was already attracting flies in the burgeoning heat of the day. Well, that’s a bit romantic, she thought. Hadn’t picked that up in their limited conversations to date. She put the kettle on and added fresh tea leaves to the pot. They were both old-fashioned that way.

Sitting down at the Laminex table, she opened the envelope and began to read.

Kate (no Dear she noted)

Talking’s never been something I’ve had much use for and the only way I know what I think about anything is if I write it down.

Unless I’m mistaken, and I don’t think I am, you’d like this occasional weekend thing to become a permanent arrangement. I can see the sense in that but I want you to be clear about what that will mean for our future. Women say they want honesty in a man but in my experience they don’t really mean it. Now’s as good a time as any to find out if you’re different.

I don’t want to marry you but I do want to spend my life with you. Instead of getting rubber-stamped by the Government or the Church, we’ll have this contract and we’ll have each other’s word that we’ll stick to it. Without that, life together would be pointless. And, besides, nothing about me will ever change. There will be no negotiation.

I’ll work hard all the rest of my life to keep a roof over our heads and put food on the table. You will be responsible for the household. I’d prefer you didn’t work but if you do, the household mustn’t suffer. I want plain traditional food. You can eat whatever your like.

If you want children, that’s fine with me but you will raise them. I will never mistreat them but I will not coddle them, because the world will not when I’m gone. They will learn tasks appropriate to their age and take responsibility for their actions.

If you have visitors or relatives to our house I won’t be interested in talking to them. You and the children will be all the society I need except for necessary business arrangements.

We will continue to have sex as long as we both want it but I won’t be ‘making love to you’.

I will never say ‘I love you’. I have no idea what ‘love’ is except people say that there wasn’t much of it around in my house when I was growing up. I guess you can’t miss what you never had.

We will be faithful to each other. I know myself well enough to know that will be true for me for all time. If you are ever unfaithful to me, the contract is ended.

I will almost certainly not remember occasions such as birthdays and anniversaries and I will ignore all attempts to rope me into Xmas.

There won’t be any cuddling on the couch and watching TV and I won’t be interested in going anywhere to be entertained.

There won’t be any deep and meaningful conversations about books or what’s in the news.

You must be thinking, “Where are the good things about this contract?”

You will have financial security as long as you live. The farm produces well and is pretty much drought-proof. If I die before you I don’t expect you to keep the farm and the place will fetch a good price.

You will have children (if you want them) to love and nurture as you wish and they will grow up knowing how to be resourceful and resilient, putting them well ahead of the pack.

You will have a faithful and respectful partner that barely drinks, doesn’t smoke, is rarely ill and will stay strong for years to come.

You will live in a community that has kept its values and its connections tight and in that sense you’ll never be alone.

And we will sit on the back porch at dusk and look over our land and not have to say how much it means to us. We will know what we’ve done together and that’s enough peace for anyone.

So, if that’s a contract you can live with for the rest of your life and never reproach me or yourself for the choices you have freely made, let me know tonight.

She put down the letter, made herself a pot of tea, took it out to the back veranda and sat in her favorite cane chair, gazing at the landscape that could be hers forever.

As Kate sipped her tea, she mulled over what she imagined constituted a proposal out here, let the landscape in to her mind until the horizon was clear and mapped out how she would provide her answer.

She returned to the kitchen, poured a second cup of tea, sat at the table and began to write. She didn’t bother with a salutation; who else would she be writing too?

I’ve heard people say that honesty can be a weapon. However, in your case I think you’re using it as insurance or, at the very least, assurance that I won’t try to change you.

Life doesn’t work like that. No matter how we isolate ourselves, the world will have its way and we have to deal with the consequences. Even for people like you who don’t follow the news, either the grapevine or the bank will tell them when there’s no longer a market for what they grow or what stock they raise; at least not at a price that they can live on.

You talk about the farm being drought-proof but you know such a thing has long gone and last year was the driest on record. In that sense, I’m not assured by your promise to keep a roof over our heads and provide well for me and any children we may have. To be blunt, that’s the sort of promise I’d expect from a townie, not a farmer.

Like you, I can take or leave marriage. It doesn’t seem to have made relationships any stronger or otherwise amongst people I’ve known. The fact that you want to spend the rest of your life with me fills me with peace and hope. But I won’t have a life without love from my partner and promising to be faithful entirely misses the point.

You know I don’t mean romance novel love or love that has to keep telling itself over and over again that it exists. That would scare me even more than what you’ve proposed. However, at the very least, I would expect you to look me in the eye and tell me you love me enough to want to spend the rest of your life with me and promise to let me know if that ever changes. (By the way, the sex doesn’t need to change – no complaints in that department.)

But here’s the real rub. We (as distinct from me alone) need to decide if we’re going to have children. And if we decide we will, you will be their father in all the important ways; comforting them, tending to their needs, teaching them patiently and defending them to the death. Don’t worry, I’m perfectly happy to take on the traditional mothering roles but I’m not going to let the cold distance of child-rearing that you inherited from your father and grandfather enter my bloodline.

How you are with others is fine with me. In case you hadn’t noticed, I’m not much different. Besides, think of the money we’ll save on presents. But we will talk, especially about the important things and we will talk about them at the time it’s needed, not when it’s too late.

I’m all for meaningful silences but when they end I want to know what they mean.

I want this life. Since the beginning I’ve felt I’m coming home when I come here and I feel lost when I’m not. I love you and I want to spend the rest of my life with you, provided you are prepared to accept what I’ve asked for in your ‘contract’ (that word is so wrong my first impulse was to take off, forever.) If that much is too much then it says a lot about our chances of survival.

I think you will because I believe you are the strongest and most honest man I have ever met and that you have finally met the woman that you need to survive what’s coming.

You can give me your answer, face to face, when I come next weekend.

Signed, guess who?

Flynn read the letter several times over, climbed on to the ancient TD-18 International Harvester tractor with its metal seat shined by three generations of ample backsides and drove out to do some ploughing. His plan was for the concentration on straight lines to bring him the peace to think clearly about what Kate had said. What wasn’t helping was the ‘love’ part.

His father had been a hard and harsh taskmaster and he found it difficult to recall any words of praise passing his lips. The most anyone could hope for was the odd grunting nod and a mumbled ‘Not bad’. His mother was only slightly better, with hugs disappearing by the time he went to school and a relentless ticking off of tasks when he came home. He understood they were hard years when they were trying to get the land into the condition that it needed to be in for long-term sustainability and there was little time for anything peripheral. And as he grew older he imagined that they thought that leaving him the legacy of the farm was, in the end, the only love that counted.

Breast cancer (deliberately left untreated he discovered later) took his mother in her late forties and five years later he found his father dead from a heart attack while repairing fences on a boundary paddock. When he picked him up, he half expected to be told to bugger off and get back to his work. Flynn made the necessary arrangements and stood dutifully solemn at their funerals, accepting condolences, but felt nothing. One day they were alive, the next day they were dead. That’s how life worked.

Women rarely entered his mind as he continued to develop the farm, with some occasional hired help. Those he had met at school seemed weak or unapproachable. After he left school, he would see them again in town, usually either flaunting what he imagined were country town fashionable clothes or pregnant or walking along with a tribe of whining kids trailing behind them.

A couple of girls had pursued him (or his property) and once he had found himself suddenly engaged to Cheryl Clarke, not that he could recall popping the question. The next thing he knew was that has being paraded around the district like a prize bull with a ring through his nose. He hibernated for weeks before that blew over.

Then one day, when he was collecting his mail from the post office, in strode a statuesque female stranger. The coat and slacks could only belong to a city type and her long red hair hung in waves down her back. Her face contained eyes and a fixed smile that spoke of openness while still conveying concealed steel.

Having collected her mail, she strode out again, unfolded herself into a dusty, dented hatchback and sped off. In the background he could hear fragments from the tongues wagging. ‘ … new schoolteacher  … not married … bit of a tartar in the schoolroom I’ve heard but the kids seem to like her … asked for wine in the pub the other day… drives like a maniac’. This woman had certainly entered Flynn’s mind and he was totally uncertain as to how to deal with that.

Up until then, he’d go into town for the mail and shop at random times, when the opportunity arose between jobs. Now he found himself on schedule to be there, coincidentally, when she came into the post office. She’d started nodding to him, as country people do, but with an odd, crooked smile on her face when she did it.

Kate made the first move. Instead of nodding, she asked him ‘I’ve heard that sometimes you take animals for agistment.’ After a moment, from the side of a barely opened mouth, he said ‘What did you have in mind?’

‘I have an ageing horse that I’d like to have close at hand.’

‘One horse?’

‘Sum total.’

‘Not sure my fences are high enough to contain a horse.’

‘Oh, her fence jumping days are over. Besides, you could ride her. If you wanted to.’

They pretended to haggle over an agistment fee and then Kate said, ‘I’ll bring her up at the weekend.’

And that weekend became many weekends.

And now here he was, having re-read Kate’s letter a hundred times and still not able to put together a coherent response..

Kate’s traveling car wreck pulled up at the veranda. She emerged, climbed the steps and sat in his Mum’s rocking chair and waited.

‘Not sure where to start’, he said.

She offered no help.

‘I love you and want to spend the rest of my life with you’ he blurted, as if fearful that if he didn’t get it out quickly his words would be strangled at birth.

Silence.

‘I negotiate every day, so I don’t know why I said that I wouldn’t.’

Silence.

‘But there’s one thing. I don’t want kids.’ His face froze as he waited for the expected eruption.

Kate laughed and said ‘Thank God for that! The alarm on my biological clock has been driving me nuts but I was prepared to turn it off for you. Confession time. I spend all day with children and the thought of coming home for more was filling me with dread.’

They watched a pair of kookaburras land in the giant redgum that dominated the front yard.

Kate’s voice softened and she said, ‘That’s enough meaningful for one day. Let’s get deep.’

They didn’t make it to the bedroom.

This piece, adapted from an earlier longer work, is a response to the prompt ‘Connection’ in the Six Sentence challenge.

By the time I met the Australian rock legend Johnny O’Keefe in 1977, I was working as a roadie for a middle-of-the-road pub band and the band’s career highlight came when they were booked to back the legendary but fast-fading Johnny O’Keefe at the Marysville pub.

The place was packed, including a large contingent of men with slicked-down ducktail haircuts and women with wide skirts supported by half a dozen starched white petticoats and as our lead guitarist intoned ‘Ladies and gentlemen, the king of Australian rock and roll, Mr. Johnny O’Keefe’, the crowd rose as one as he launched into a strangely stiff and unwild version of The Wild One.

As he progressed through all the old hits like She’s My Baby, I’m Counting on You, Move Baby Move and She Wears My Ring, I could sense an uneasiness in the crowd, as if they were thinking ‘well, he’s here but he isn’t’ but they were tempering their disappointment out of respect for The King and what the tickets had cost them.

His big finale was always ‘Shout’ and he was half-way through the famous opening sustained holler of ‘We-e-e-e-e-e-e-ll’ when his microphone died, spelling disaster for me and for Johnny.

Now scarlet from head to toe, I ran to the stage, and as his vacant eyes looked at the new mike, I said lamely ‘sorry, Johnny’ and he mumbled ‘that’s alright, mate’.

After the obligatory standing ovation and the refusal of more encores, Johnny’s manager bundled him into a car and they sped off into the night, seemingly oblivious to the fact that no-one was chasing Johnny any more.

This piece was written for the Carrot Ranch’s double ennead challenge. Obviously this relates to winter in the northen parts of the northern hemisphere.

Sol sat solo, silent,

in his melting cell,

hatching his plan to flee his hibernation,

bring Winter’s reign down and

turn freeze into free.

Summer would soon follow,

(he would scorch the earth)

but a more compelling task was now at hand,

bring life to seeming dead

seeds in fertile earth.

‘Arise the Thor of thaw.’

‘Freedom’ did he cry.

He rent the prison’s icy bars asunder,

re-leaved trees in green and

set the waters free.

This piece was written for D’Verse’s challenge this week to demonstrate turns in poetry – where a poem shifts gear or opens a window.

At her birth

she staggered on unfamiliar legs

while her mother licked her clean

and tried not to stand on her in forgetfulness

or fatigue.

Soon she stood alone,

with a coat that waxed in spring

and waned in winter moon.

At the yearling sale she pranced,

nostrils flared,

unminded of her fetlocks

in the racing years.

In time, she ran her maiden,

romance in full stride when,

shifting in the running,

her stablemate grabbed the inside rail.

She took off in pursuit.

(Nothing cuts like an odds-fed whip

a furlong out from home.)

And then, snap!

“History”, her verdict went

and the vets screened the final shot.

Her blood soaked into the track

and into the knacker’s van

and she was gone.

This is my response to the D’Verse poetry challenge around paradox.

I am the mother of deserved sorrows

I am the ender of the grief.

I am violator of the rapists

I am the robber of the thief.

I am killer of the killers,

I am the harbinger of fate.

I am the slayer of the ‘innocent’

that breached the children’s gate.

I am the puncher of the punchers

that break a woman’s face.

I am the Lord High re-positioner

that puts them in their place.

I am the fleecer of the businesses

that live by telling lies.

I leave their empty bank accounts

to the mercy of the flies.

I am the new messiah

that brings preachers to their knees

and opens up their honeypots

to the faithful’s bees.

I am the paradox of virtue

wrapped in the cloak of vice.

The warm blood of the evil

no match for veins of ice.

I’m pleased to reblog this superb piece by Chel Owens. Tell Me the Story, Daddy. | Chel Owens

This preposterous piece of poetic puerility was written for the divine Ms. Owen’s ‘A Mused Poetry’ prompt for this week: ‘Snarky Rant. That’s right: a jaded, sarcastic, fed up, perhaps even nihilistic poem in an “I stick it to you, sucky events!” manner.‘ I’ll thank Charles Dodgson for the inspiration when next I see him.

The time has come, so all us said,

to not talk of many things:

of twits and tweets to ‘mind your beeswax’

of savages and would-be kings

of whether votes are fixed or not

and whether pigs have wings.

Be gone, your wretched plague talk

of drinking Kool-Aid with your bleach

of bingeing booze and Netflix

of not going to the beach

of ‘who is that masked stranger?’

No more, I do beseech!

Let’s rid ourselves of poverty

Of coherent speech and word

Spike the ‘like’ and ‘whatever’

Treat WTF as if a steaming t**d

Let’s have a pedant as a President,

a VP proud to be a nerd.

Fie upon the boomer bashers

Flinging our legacy askew

Blaming us for every ill

From planet to housing queue

End their blameless sanctimony;

Vegans, anyone, on the barbecue?