Z-words

Z-words include Zoo, Zipper, Zeugma

Simon and Garfunkle composed a song that fits the letter ‘Z’ and is a song that flows readily from the recesses of my memory. Is it really “all happening at the zoo?”  Well, maybe yes, because I think life is a kind of zoo.

Just think about the diversity of people, cultures, philosophies and responses to both mundane and exciting experiences and you have a zoo in the making. Different body shapes, living environments, housing arrangements – zoos do this for their animals.

Also, we’re caged behind bars of our own making. How much of who you really are at the core of your being do you present to the world? Or do you harbor talents and skills, fears and emotions behind a mask, held like a gambler holding his cards so close, even he can barely discern their numbers?

Zippers, another word that is also fitting to the way people close themselves away from reality. We zip up our cocoon, draw on a mask, and push our essential self into hiding. While perhaps a protection mechanism, the result is a loss of freedom to embrace the wholeness of our chosen presence on this fabulous planet.

Zeugma, a disconcerting use of language, as in: On his fishing trip, he caught three trout and a cold. The “official” definition: the use of a word to modify or govern two or more words when it is appropriate to only one of them or is appropriate to each but in a different way.

What does that have to do with the rest of this blog? Everything and nothing relates to what’s happening at the zoo!

** ** **

Zillions

the years

I will live as

abstruse small pieces,

in dark corners of memory,

buried

UNTIL THEN,

old age

resists borders,

shifts in time as years rise,

once sixty, today arrives when

health fades