Stupidity?

"You know what my morbid fear is," she asked, quite out of the blue.

Sure, I was taken aback but I kept an inscrutable face as best as I could.

"Waking up one morning and realising that I am not as smart as I was when I went to bed. What if I became stupid? Could I live with it?"

I didn't know how to react to it. What should I say? What could I? I was burthened with a deep dark part of her self and I was honoured to be privy to it. But, why me? I was silent lest my feeble attempt at a response would, in her eyes, make me undeserved of this revelation.

"Is that a paradox?," I said, after a moment that stretched the length of my arm when my arm was the length of the street. "I mean, if you woke up one morning stupid, would you even care to be intelligent? Do you see what I am trying to say? The fear of the stupid is only for the intelligent. When you are stupid, you are content in your stupidity. Or put another way, wouldn't you be so stupid that you don't realise what it is to be intelligent, much less that you went to bed as one?"

"Ok! You win the prize for saying the most number of 'stupids' in one breath," she said. The moment had passed with the suddenness of a blown candle.

That was incredibly stupid of me.

A chance encounter

What fortuity brought us together
under the lighthouse
erect phallus
throwing beacons of light
to straying ships
It is said that stars are potent
that the distant planets have
an influence
It was Mars that brought me to you
True. A little brass tablet on the beach
extolling the many features of the star
A hand rose from the red soil
and steered us
pawns
cattle
ever so slowly
towards our destiny
un-separate
The howling gale coursed
from the frozen shores of the antarctic
fine dust rose like a fragrance
and waves left their footprints on sand
And you sang, my nightingale
through little white earphones
Angels descended
to dance on the rim of my coffee cup
Neruda travelled through the pages
to read his words to us
(and in your voice became you)
And so did Eliot
and Bukowski
Poets milled the room to please you
stealing verses from one another
and failing in their feeble effort
to describe you
to capture in words that which cannot be
Time vanished
Objects disappeared
Everything ceased
There was you
and me
as one.