Life is a Minestrone

Here's a short piece based on the chorus to the 10cc song of the same name.


"Life is a minestrone...
served up with parmesan cheese
Death is a cold lasagne
suspended in deep freeze..."

So if life is a minestrone, served up with parmesan cheese,
then life's most intimate moments, are surely onions, lentils and beans.
Ok, so let's try to keep an open mind, I mean this isn't a tinned Heinz microwave lunch,
this is a fine Italian delicacy, 10cc's microcosmic metaphor, and perhaps a whole lot more.
Let's think it through.

Life is Italy's most substantial soup, a hot pot of dreams and fears.
Love's a mushroom and lust's a turnip and our sadness, and all our tears, are
bits of shell-shaped pasta, brewing in a bean-stock broth, all brown and… British?

But death is a cold lasagne.
A cold lasagne suspended in deep freeze.
A layer of pasta, a layer of sauce and another layer of cheese, and
there's the thing.

On one hand we have life as a bowl of mixed morals, feelings, moments and histories
kept in flux by a hot savoury broth. On the other is death, a plate
stacked up with me and you, and everything we've ever felt or seen or heard,
kept from collapsing in an avalanche of Béchamel sauce and over-cooked tomato by the cold, congealing cheese.

So I guess when you put it that way, 10cc were onto something big.
So I'll take out that old lasagne, that cause of so much strife,
And I'll whack it in the blender and have a good old bowl of life.

Bottle Opener

Save me.

Save me from everything I'm rapidly imbibing.

From the liver-guzzling

mind-puzzling

death of me.

The dinner-spewing

kin accruing

breath of me.

The head mashing

public flashing

car crashing

festivity.

The bank breaking

household shaking

mass head-aching

ingesting spree.

This "bottle of fun,

quick hit and run

regret what I've done"

felony.

Never Mind

Never mind the piles of paper stacked

up on my desk.

Never mind the seventeen missed calls

flashing

on my phone.

Don't worry about the wall of sticky notes

covering my window

my book case

my face.

It's not as though I use my wall calendar for anything

other than looking at the pictures of

puppies.

Why does it matter that the clock is an hour slow?

I'd forgotten it even was.

What's important, is that

I beat your high score.