Jane Wyatt Was a More Elegant Mother for Spock

            On Saturday around midday I rode down to No Frills where I bought five bags of black sable grapes, two half-pints of raspberries, a one-litre bottle of olive oil for $5 and some mouthwash.

Outside the supermarket was an old lady with a walker smoking. A guy asked her for a cigarette but she mumbled, “Sorry!” a few times. I was unlocking my bike when she finished her fag and hobbled slowly past me. I smiled at her and she said, “Hi, nice day innit?”

After I got home I went back out to the liquor store to buy two cans of Creemore, which is still on sale. I should take advantage and buy a case next time.

I chatted with my next-door neighbour Benji and told him about the couple in the building next door complaining to the city about my singing. He was surprised because he said he couldn’t hear a thing. I told him that no one has ever complained in twenty years and if anyone would I would have thought that it would be my upstairs neigbour, Cesar, who is a chronic complainer. I guess sound doesn’t really travel upward though. I can hear Cesar moving around above me but he probably can’t hear me as much.

I put my groceries away and tidied up before lunch. I had a slice of toast with two slices of marble cheese. For dessert I had a slim slice of strawberry-rhubarb pie and some strawberry yogourt.

For an hour or so in the evening I worked on reading the poems that my fellow group members submitted this week and writing critiques of them.

Vivian continues to have a lot of disjointed verses within her poems that don’t help pull everything together. She also makes a lot of grammatical errors.

Blythe is back with her shorter, cryptic poems, which are often absurd and work best when there's s ghost of logic injected into them.

Margaryta’s poems are still excellent but I had more critiques this time and she even had one grammatical error. In “ … makes graveyards seem silent and bookstores sound loud”, “seem” already qualifies both “silent" and "loud" so she doesn’t need to write “sound loud”. So it could be " ... makes graveyards seem silent and bookstores loud".

I reworked my poem “Makeup Mirror” based mostly on Albert’s critiques during the Poetry Master Class on Thursday night:

My mind is not a blank

It’s a world-class junkyard,

and sometimes I’ve got to pull rank

to not soil my hands on it’s deck of discards

by sifting through the debris

for treasures that I know are there, yes

because people don’t like what they see

when your nails are all dirty

from clutching awareness

My heart is a silver ball

rolling on the glass top

of a pinball game in an arcade hall

above the playfield and yet still I am caught

by the mermaids’ flipper tails

that touchlessly cause me to roll

up and back down that transparent hill

where it seems that their flirting's

made me give up control

Then sometimes that ball is fixed

so the nymphs can apply

adjustments of their makeup and lipstick

in reflections distorted by my convex sides

            I edited my poem “The Long Warm Thread Between Us”, not so much because of any critiques, but just from having looked at it closer as a result of presenting it.

< align="left" style="line-height: normal; text-align: left;"> I feel the gravity

of the warm tightrope in between us

Things come into being

firemen rescue a man from kneeling

I don’t ask for too much

but a lifelong slowly healing touch

I want on that streetcar

wherever it’s going I don't care

Any discarded parts

leave Frankenstein’s child an orphan of art

Abundance is so lush

it’s just too much how it’s never enough

The ego's a person too

though there’s so much pimpin that it do

            For dinner I had an egg with toast and a beer while watching last week’s episode of Star Trek Discovery.

            Spoiler alert!

            Spock’s mother Amanda arrives on Discovery to see her stepdaughter Michael Burnham after having gone to visit her son at the psychiatric facility where he has been held. Apparently Spock has escaped after having murdered three members of the medical staff. Amanda has stolen Spock’s medical records. Burnham decrypts them and they discover images that Spock had drawn of the red angel. Amanda reveals that Spock has been having visions of the red angel ever since he was a child and that when Michael had run away from home Spock had claimed that the red angel had told him where she was. Michael discloses that she and Spock were children she had deliberately pushed him away to protect him from enemies that might have tried to hurt him to get to her.

            Meanwhile on the Klingon homeworld, Ash is living as the close companion of  L’Rell, the Klingon chancellor while at the same time acting as a Federation spy. He discovers though that when he was Voq, the Klingon leader, he and L’Rell had a child. The child is an albino Klingon like Voq had been. The baby is kidnapped by a Klingon tribal leader named Kol-Sha who wants L’Rell to pass chancellorship over to him. L’Rell and Ash fight Kol-Sha’s warriors and kill them but Kol-Sha arrives with a paralysing weapon. He is about to slit Ash’s throat when suddenly the renegade Terran emperor, Philippa Georgiou beams in with weapons that make short work of Kol-Sha and his warriors. It seems that now she is an operative for a Federation black-ops team. L’Rell fakes the death of both Ash and her baby and declares herself the Klingon Mother. Ash takes his child to a special Klingon monestary and then joins Philippa’s team.

            Meanwhile Tilly continues to be plagued by the ghost of her deceased school friend May. Tilly is trying to complete command training but May distracts her with her demands, such as shouting at her during a training exercise that Pike is not the real captain. Tilly reveals her problem to Burnham who immediately realizes that May cannot be a hallucination because Tilly tells Burnham that May just asked her why there is water coming from her eyes. A hallucination from Tilly’s mind would know what tears are. They go to Stamets and he discovers that “May” is a spore that infected Tilly when she was dissecting the anti-matter asteroid. They remove and contain May in her true fungal form.

            I don’t like the casting for Spock’s human mother on this series. Mia Kirshner is just not as elegant in the role as Jane Wyatt was in the original series.