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.

Having spent the last week or so ranting about US gun laws and Utter Stupidity (the two terms being interchangeable) it occurs to me that other species of our planet must observe us and wonder what all the hype about ‘intelligence’ is.

Combining that with our continuing failure to face the realities of climate change (my own nation being amongst the worst offenders) …. and all that flora and fauna might be beginning to realise that the accident of our birth is turning out to have been a very serious accident indeed.

There is no way, of course, that I can express the sentiment nearly as well as did Eric Idle, who said ….

“So remember, when you’re feeling very small and insecure,
How amazingly unlikely is your birth;
And pray that there’s intelligent life somewhere out in space,
‘Cause there’s bugger all down here on Earth!”

There is little more I can do, therefore, to limit my own stupidity, other than focus on just being merely silly. As follows ….

*

Behold the astral goat my friend
The snout that sniffs, the ears that bend
Receiving signals from the stars
Messages to Earth from Mars
Beware as well the winged baboon
That flies up there above the moon
And looks down on your wretched face
From vantage points in outer space
And fear you should the cosmic bee
Her nectar through the galaxy
The psychic moose that’s on the loose
Dark matter ducks, the Gibbous Goose
Look down my friend, but don’t look up
The universe is just a pup
But it will soon become the beast
It’s wrath and fury soon released
Await the final sacred cow
Go hide beneath the blankets now
Lest you be like the dinosaur
A victim of a meteor

*

Please look after your kids.

Following my humiliating (but not unexpected) recent defeat at the hands of the NYC Midnight judges I have meekly returned to my roots, cap in hand, to bore you with silly poems. Some a lot sillier than others but none requiring any serious thought – on my part or that of the reader.

I remember discovering, to my youthful dismay, that the plural of platypus is platypuses and not platipi. This is an outrage. How can such a delicate and graceful little animal be given such a cumbersome plural when a relatively clumsy oaf like the hippopotamus gets something so much more poetic? I won’t stand for it!

Anyway, I was considering the platypus last night whilst drinking heavily and cursing, yet again, the NYC Midnight judges, and thought it high time to express my feelings on this poorly appointed plural.

*

We are but mammals, you and I
Together with the platypi
Our species not in short supply
Such is our wish to multiply
We live on land yet yearn to fly
To hope just once, before we die
This gravity to yet defy
To rise one day, and touch the sky

*

By way of factual information, by the way, for those not familiar with this wide brown land, the platypus does not, it would seem, multiply veraciously, as I might have suggested for poetic convenience. Kangaroo, on the other hand (no plural required, they are almost never seen alone) breed like rabbits, and there are eight or nine of them on my front lawn right now.