Matinee Muse 14

Juxtaposed Realities and Strange Bedfellows

CLICHÉ CLASH

You know the old expressions
‘Eyes too close together’
‘I couldn’t even trust him
As far as I could throw him’
That was Johnny to a tee
A former friend, of sorts
When I was just a schoolboy
So many moons ago
He was much smaller than me
‘Knee-height to a grasshopper’
Skinny’ undernourished
Devious expression
But I kind of liked him
He lived on the New Estate
‘The wrong side of the tracks’
Out of bounds, for ‘good boys’
Which I was, in theory at least
I often used to wonder
Just how far I could throw him
A few pounds, soaking wet
I wouldn’t even see him land
‘Porky’ once said to him
‘I can read you like a book’
That one really threw him
(What had ‘Porky’ read lately?)
It just goes to show you though
Nobody should ever try
To ‘judge a book by its cover’

Splitting the Infinitive, Splitting up Infinity

To split the Infinitive
Is as devastating as
Splitting the Atom, to some.
I don’t know how to do it
Atom, not infinity.
To carefully split a verb
From its infinitive is
Not acceptable at all,
But does it really matter?
Worse things have happened at sea,
Any sailor will tell you.
Do they split infinitives
So they can know without doubt
Which is bad and which is worse?
Let’s look at infinity,
Beginning to end (?) of time.
Almost infinite options.
It can be split up in years
Centuries, Millennia,
Hours, days, weeks; even months.
Then there are minutes; seconds.
In time, anything applies.
To justify existence,
A lifetime is an ‘Era’,
The Past is called ‘History’,
The Present is ‘Here and Now’,
The Future is ‘Yet to Come’.
Infinity and Tenses
Go together, hand in hand.
Why no justification
For splitting Infinitives?
Consider Infinity.
The same consideration
Applies to infinitives
Surely there’s something in that.
To completely illustrate,
(To illustrate completely,)
I’ll offer an example.
I’ll leave you to work it out.
Is it ‘To Over Sleep’? Or
Is it ‘To Sleep Over’? Which?

Was that a Preposition
At the end of a sentence
About five lines ago?
Or are things like that allowed?

Nothing is ever easy!