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Lump of earth moves, becomes toad.
Toad slowly crawls the few inches to shelter,
seeming annoyed, but that’s only in my mind.
Its mind maybe full of no more than this:
“Large thing moving above, possibility of being stepped on,
evasive action recommended; slug today?”
I go to the computer, look up ‘toad’.
The common toad, bufo bufo, lives
to ten, twenty, even forty years, it says.
How many times in all that time
does a toad have to get out of our way?
Maybe in toad’s mind the calculations flicker:
“This is the one thousand and eleventh occasion
that I have moved for these tedious large objects;
nobody notices; a toad’s karma is improved
by such suffering; slug today?”
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12 comments:
this is great Zeph, a quirky vignette
one for all the Frogs here, not karma chameleon
love the sort of detached empathy in the tone and the toads projected POV
raises the question; how many times do we, as toads, get missed by milimetres by the great clog of dog?
I've always had a soft spot for toads, and this offering - which I like a lot, Zeph - reminded me of driving with my dad from Oxford to South Wales (via the Forest of Dean) and having fun counting how many Toad Crossing signs we could see along the way.
Zeph,
did you kiss it? Did anything like this happen?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K5g6H0fV1TY
Tahitifrog: There is one case on record of a kissed frog turning into a handsome prince, but no cases at all of toads turning into anything nice ever, so a girl would have to be pretty stupid to kiss a toad. Hell, she'd have to be fairly deranged to kiss Peter Gabriel.
There is something strange that goes on in Australia I believe, next time DocShoot is here we can get him to explain about cane toads.
File: the clog of Dog misses us.. and then it doesn't...
Mimi: Toad Crossing sounds like rather a nice village.
I think you should kiss every batrachian life form you encounter, just to be on the safe side. But yes, especially frogs.
girls, guys, whatever,
if you really have to kiss an amphibian why don't you go for a newt?
File: because Ken Livingstone might have been there first!
Zeph: if Toad Crossing was a village, it'd be somewhere in darkest Kent where they have places called things like Badgers Mount!
oi Mimi, there's nowt wrong wi newts!
badgers mount ye say...I think I've done that, is it the one where...
File: I thing names of England villages are a rich mine to be seamed. I once nearly crashed a Mini Cooper as we wet our pants laughing about Powler's Piece!
That should have been think not thing
... or even think notthing...
someone's got a bit too much time on their hands, people actually live in these places:
Acocks Green (UK)
Balls Falls (Can)
Condom (Fra, where else?)
Peckers Point (Can, should be twinned with Powler's Piece)
Titz (Ger)
Boggy Bottom (UK)
...if someone had a bit more time they could even write a story with these and the others, or go to Fucking (Austria)
peace y'all
sorry Zeph,
this has got far far away from your carefully inquisitive piece, which actually says a lot more about life and people than it does about bufo bufo, but remember that some Toad Stools can be poisonous
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