new Q for Friday...

How do you feel about poetry?

Good, it's something beautiful, catching things often better than prose or the plain spoken word - similar to photography and cinematography.

it's alright.
better than maths.
can't stand poets though.

whose?

any's whose you like or don't like or...

this one makes sense today:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of "Spiritus Mundi"
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

***

I like poetry, when executed well.

with a gun, preferably.

My feelings about poetry are private.

DON’T WORRY, YOU’RE NOT IN THIS POEM

Big names draw little name clusters
Like wrecks draw insurance adjusters:
The image their raw hatred musters
Is Manson or Dahmer;
The meetings and greetings and seatings
Of poets at poetry readings
Remind me of sharks at their feedings --
Except sharks are calmer.

The women compete for attention
From powerful people whose mention
May get them promotion, a pension,
Or merely a raise;
Another year fatter and older
They flirt with old flames now grown colder
Then fall for a younger one’s bolder,
If less truthful, praise.

The men snort their picayune grouses
And act like low libertine louses
Betraying their principles, spouses,
And significant others,
Drinking to knock back the terror
That there’s been a terrible error
And history may yet prove a fairer
Judge than their mothers.

I watch the free-versers and rhymers,
Idealists and down-in-the-slimers,
Sweet hermits and sly social climbers
All chasing careers;
Their earnestness makes me despair of them --
Each likely recombinant pair of them;
You’d think I’d have learned to beware of them,
Shielded by sneers.

But now they have organized locally,
The urban-enraged and the yokelly,
Leaving the business side jokily
Under-explored;
Did I, when asked for my attitude,
Give it? Or give them wide latitude?
No, I accepted with gratitude
A seat on the Board.

when it's good, there's nothing better.

when it's bad, there's nothing worse.

auntie you sure you are taling about poetry?

i feel very strongly about poetry

so does the entire lower east side

even those who choose to ignore it

new question for saturday:

astrology - fascinating insight into the cosmic forces which influence our lives, or load of old bollocks?

i grant you permission to copy and paste my answer at will as it applies.

fascinating insight. mercury goes into retrograde on monday and you'd better believe i'll pay attention to the details, dot my i's and cross my t's, until it's over.




scorpio born in the year of the dragon, if anyone's curious... ;)

Both.

Am always getting totally crazy at the end of December to really read all the horoscopes for the new year I come across (I go even so far as to buy Bild! :eek:)

During the year I sometimes read the personalised horoscopes (where you have to enter birthplace and exact time of birth - that approximately every 12th person has exactly the same fate is bollocks, unless it says something positive for my sign ;)) at noeastro

Ah, yes, and sun in Pieces, moon in Scorpio rocks! :D Don't like my ascendent though, it's boring and I won't tell it!

both

how could it be anything but both?!

Gah.

Yah, I think the sort in the newspaper is old, moldy bollocks, but there are some other sorts that I now confess to being slightly less skeptical about these days. Depends heavily on the astrologer, and I'm not sure whether even the really good ones are truly using the stars or are doing some other kind of reading that I don't understand well.

Generalized crock o' shit.

I'm with Bertam R. Forer.

is he behaving himself?

Yeah, foxy, watch out for that guy.
I shared an elevator with him once, and he tried to slip his subjective validation down the front of my blouse.

i'm with trish

are you behaving yourself?

i think it's bollocks, but all my friends are like their starsigns.
probably just luck.

:rolleyes:

of course

.. and thanks for asking :)

it means so much!

oh good, i still get to answer before the new query.....
This question is right up my alley.
YOU'VE GOTTA BE KIDDING RIGHT? lol
It's a trick question, huh?

New ¿ question of the day ? for January 27th (ish):

What's the biggest risk you've ever taken?

I told an astrologer bigger than me that astrology was all a load of old bollocks.

i told a poet bigger than me that he was a pretentious wonker.
his name was macrus blaes and now he's stalking me on the internut!

:eek:

actually too many to say. taking pills bought from a slimy looking bloke with dreadlocks at 4am in a club in manchester would be up there. getting on a bike with no brakes and cycling downhill to get some water was another. coming to berlin, getting married, walking out, etc etc.

:)

packing up only what could fit into my car and moving sight-unseen to nashville in 1997.

Studying music in college as opposed to having a " un" real job. Still wondering how that's going to work out.

Moved to the Hills, to a house that was more expensive than we would have liked, on the side of a cliff and overgrown by waist high scrub.

As of Friday, valued at 50% more than we paid for it three years and several pick-axes ago.

Gratuitous pics.

Before

After

After

^beautiful

opening a small pottery business on a small island in the northern bahamas at the age of 24

^^I have to say, that is one beauteous walkway - and I don't need an astrologer to tell me that.

Probably the biggest risk I ever took was riding a motorcycle throughout my twenties - until I finally got run off of the road by a car who was turning right from the left-hand lane and ended up taking an ambulance ride in a full back brace.

Climbing up the face of a cliff in Ibiza in flip flops as a shortcut to regaining the main path (after having swum in the ocean). At one point one of the flip flops started bending and i realized my handholds were actually these very brittle sedimentary type rocks that basically were useless. I had to climb downwards when i realized this, which was very difficult, and was saved by a strand of wildgrass that was resistant enough to carry my weight as i eased myself back downwards.

That day i really thought i was going to die. I would have gone out in my bathing suit, probably with half a flip flop hanging off my foot. How embarrassing :rolleyes:

Risked eating something other than boiled white rice today.
Didn't work out too well.

Hmmm..biggest risk ever would probably be sitting down in the same spot where I'd been struck by lightning, in a metaphorical sense, a week earlier.

Pretty much everything I did when 16-17, which was pretty much everything but drugs (tried them twice, with 14 and 19 - did not convince me)
Some other things later on I feel not like talking about.