Ishtar's Shithouse Poetry

I’ve always thought of myself as intuitive. From the moment I learned the word as a child, it felt like the perfect description of the things I sensed before I should know them. One of my earliest memories is a vivid example of this uncanny intuition—what I consider a type of very mild precognition.  It was my last year of Primary School, and the Christmas play was a big event. That year, our tiny village school—with barely 60 students—had splurged on the rights to play the music from  Joseph and the Amazing Technicolour Dreamcoat . The excitement buzzed through the classroom as the teachers began announcing the cast.  We were all crammed into the biggest classroom, fidgeting in anticipation as name after name got called. My own name hadn’t been mentioned yet, but as the roles dwindled and with only a handful of us left, a strange and knowing thought crept into my mind: "No. They wouldn’t... Why would you even think that?",  I tried to shake it off, but the feeling I...

I was once a zookeeper and one of the most memorable days in that role by far, was the day we moved our lioness into her new enclosure. The Plan: Get the transport box into the inside enclosure and up against the hatch door to the outside enclosure. Someone would then lift the hatch, we could then lift the door on the transport crate and she should just run out. We could then close the doors behind her, remove the box and make a safe exit, before securing everything and giving the lioness access back inside. The best laid plans never go as expected. The old lioness in her wooden transport crate was so heavy, that it took almost every zookeeper working that day to lift the box. With us all crammed onto each side and with barely any room to move, we shuffled our way from the tractor into the enclosure in a fashion reminiscent of Terry Pratchett's 'Luggage'. The lioness was not happy about her containment and after setting the crate down, she began to move around inside, grum...

I've always known I was different in some way, though I never really understood what exactly it was about me that made it so. From the outside, I look pretty normal. I would say I am reasonably friendly, pretty confident in myself and I can hold a decent conversation with pretty much anyone. However, I would consider myself akin to Marilyn Munster, in that my weirdness isn't quite on display. I have always felt like I am on the outside looking in. I'm not so bothered that others don't understand me, as that is understandable, as bothered by the fact others fail to accept or believe how my world works differently. That people don't trust I have such a difference or that those differences impact my life. Or worse, they are threatened or scared by it.  As a youngster, I just figured my being considered "a bit weird" was because I was rather tall and wore glasses. I towered over everyone else and wearing glasses was a stigma that people today have forgotten. ...