I’ve been rummaging through old stuff and aborted plans and discovering that most things find their way into the junk pile for a reason. I am headed there soon enough myself, of course, so I may as well get used to the decor.

Increasingly I find that, all too often, my thoughts get overtaken by nostalgic melancholy or unconvincing optimism.

This looks like some sort of love letter I might have written in my teens to somebody more beautiful than myself (so it could have been to just about anybody) trying to convey a feeling of symbiosis. back then I was willing to try almost anything.

But Im sure it doesn’t go back that far.

*

I am rough
She is my smooth
When I am flat
She is my groove
From the valley
She’s my hill
i am weak
She is my will
If I’m black
She is my white
She is my day
She is my night
I hold her hand
She holds my heart
God let us never
Be apart.

*

P.S. Always be suspicious when an atheist mentions God. There must be an ulterior motive.

Further to an earlier post (here) in which I reported having deleted my contribution to the ever expanding genre of erotic soup poetry (here) I now discover that Chel did not. So here it is …

Soup fetishists, as you probably know, in order to combat the gallons of liquid calories that they consume during gastronomic orgies, prefer poetry that makes them physically ill. I might include this work in my yet to be published anthology ‘Songs of Love and Bulimia (vol III)’.

*

Soup

that I scoop out of the entrails of our love

the little bits of pre-digested passion
that fall like manna from above

and into the tureen. obscene in a fashion
our love that travelled the universe like a comet

with all the colours of a parrot

oh, wait. that’s vomit

and I think I see a bit of carrot

floating around in there

somewhere

with the noodles and oodles of emotion

providing the notion

to express

like milk from the breast

all the best,
to us

with love

Brutus

*

And something of a specialty of mine, though I remain in awe of others.

Chel and I share a passion for this sort of thing and I must say that her poem about soup, this morning (my time) was quite special. It gives one something to aspire to. I repeat it here for your reading displeasure …

*

I don’t like soup it makes me think of love
Erstwhile torment forsooth magniloquent
Like when my boyfriend made me soup with doves
Pain angst pain angst pain angst I’m eloquent
I took a steak he cut out from my heart
Or flank -oh, agony! At least the taste
Was better, far, than soup I think in part
But haste I hates or waste on waist for taste
“You make no sense,” he croons from slurping spoon,
“The dove I caught, the steak a homophone.”
“Alas,” I rage to azure suns, then swoon
At this failed step to feed my sex hormones
Something symbolic and depressed goes here
And then I rhyme with ‘soup’ and sound unclear

*

It’s not too late to offer her your own soup recipe, but try to remember that anything with any claim to artistic merit will go to the bottom of the pile.

I did write something in response but I seem to have (considerately) deleted it.

Nevertheless, in the spirit of terrible poetry, I did offer something to Sammi which required 45 words relating in some way to the one word ‘Zest’. Here is what I said …

*

Buried here amongst his peers
Family. The near and dears
A man of hope. Of endless love
Now somewhere yonder, up above
Having taken one last breath
Repose forever now in death
Gone his treasured zest for life
(I caught him messing with my wife)

*

And now dammit, it’s come to my attention that it was supposed to be only 41 words. But if something is worth doing badly I might as well get it completely wrong. And anyway, I’m too lazy to do anything about it. Feel free to deduct 4 words of your own choosing at random – it will have little impact on the overall artistic merit.

Here’s something a bit different.

For reasons quite unrelated to this post I stumbled upon a strange and slightly haunting artefact today. I refer to the picture above. It was given to me long, long ago, in a gesture, I believe, of sincere love. I should point out that we are talking about teen love here – the purest of love, but not always the best thought out. I failed to appreciate it properly, as such, at the time, and am suddenly harbouring feelings of guilt.

Not that there’s any shortage of things to feel guilty about in my past.

I’ve had to snip the bottom off it a bit for publication, as it gets a bit personal, lower down (no pun intended). The poem is by a fellow named Rabindranath Tagore,who sounds like a character from a Kurt Vonnegut novel but was, in fact, a Bengali poet and painter who won the Nobel prise for literature in 1913. So what I uncovered today turns out to be part of a very long story, I suppose.

The poem itself is here.

*

Where the mind is without fear
and the head is held high
Where knowledge is free
Where the world has not been broken up into fragments by narrow domestic walls; Where words come out from the depths of truth;
Where tireless striving
stretches its arms towards perfection; Where the clear stream of reason
has not lost its way into the
dreary desert sand of dead habit; Where the mind is led forward
by thee into ever widening
thought and action-
into that heaven of freedom,
my father,
let my country awake.

*

It’s difficult to know what possible association the poem has to the drawing and the (very brief) relationship that gave rise to it. It was a fairly cosmic period of my life. A lot of strange things happened.

I don’t know if the drawing actually means anything to anyone anywhere. I’d certainly be interested to hear if it did.

But I bring it into the light again as a way of saying, to somebody, both thank you and sorry. I’m sure that, in some language, there’s a word that means both.