A Comfy Kind Of Restless

Howdy!

How you doing?

So who doesn’t like reading about sharks and Megalodons?! I turned to P16 and 20 of a book called World Of Animals Book of Sharks and Ocean Predators that I found on the Readly app to fulfil the brief for Day 24’s Napo prompt:

Find a factual article about an animal. A Wikipedia article or something from National Geographic would do nicely – just make sure it repeats the name of the animal a lot. Now, go back through the text and replace the name of the animal with something else – it could be something very abstract, like “sadness” or “my heart,” or something more concrete, like “the streetlight outside my window that won’t stop blinking.” You should wind up with some very funny and even touching combinations, which you can then rearrange and edit into a poem.

I chose to use the world ‘fear’ to replace ‘shark’.  P20 has a nice illustration of how Megalodons would measure up to humans and explains they fed on whales.  I chose to play about with my word substitution in an excerpt from P16:

Nearly every stereotype of the fear is wrong.  They aren’t primitive animals, they aren’t mindless killing machines and they don’t prey on humans.

Fears are elasmobranchs, meaning that they are fish with cartilage skeletons instead of bones.  Far from being an evolutionary leftover, however, this evolved to save weight so large fears could still be fast and agile swimmers.

Cartilage also lets fear conserve calcium and phosphorus, which is important because they need both for making teeth. And they get through a lot of those.  Fears treat their teeth as disposable weapons and can lose a couple with every bite…

[ISBN 978 1785 461 187]

As the last step, I wrote a poem using what I had learned about ‘fear’ thanks to this prompt.

Whale-cries from my stomach.

Some Megalodon

has risen from the depths

to finish me off;

its blunt nose in my business,

its looming shadow

the movement at the corner of my eye.

Sharp serrations.

Searing.

Ossifying oddness left behind.

Prefrontal! Prelimbic!

ATTACK!!

Prehistoric predator prevails.

If you are interested, I read an article about Fear and the brain’s responses to it here.

The kids are away out in the back garden playing footie with their dad and will want my laptop when they’re back.  I have been giving out a lot of hugs and talking about sharks, so again this has taken a while to construct 😉

I hope you have sunshine and good things to look forward to whatever your Saturday brings.  Take care and have fun!

Monty X

[pic is from here]

Come visit the Facebook page and follow @ComfyRestless on Twitter

Copyright © 2021  Montaffera All Rights Reserved

Please do not use any of my content (posts, pictures, poetry etc) without my permission, but feel free to link back to my blog if something catches your eye. Thank you!