Poetry and Truth

DOES ANYONE KNOW A SHOP SELLING HUGE WHITE SMOCK SHIRTS? I have decided to become a poet, you see. So I need one. I already have a fountin pen bought on special offer for 30p. It came with 3 blue cartridges but I need poetical black ones. And thick acid free Sketch 100 paper for manuscripts and lots of lovely red wine to leave poetic winestains all over my poetic manuscripts. I already have a special notebook for copying poems into. Problem is I haven't really written one for 20 years. And I have a halfarsed poetry blog not even I read.

Thing is if someone said "here are some oils, paint a portrait after the manner of Leonardo da Vinci" I'd be stumped. But if someone said "knock out a Spenserean stanza, two sonnets, a Shakespearean and a Petrarchan and ten stanzas in terza rima" I could do it and I've found some of my best stuff (with my habit of copying out other people's work) and wondered who on earth wrote it! It was only fragments so nothing ever got copied up and saved. Only finished stuff is saved.

Once I have the shirt and the wine and a finished opus I'll put a bit online. I have thought up a way of promoting my opus that has never been done before, especially not by a living poet and THAT is how I want my work published. If I give away my idea somebody else shall only take it so I can't tell it till it's done.

I dearly would love to switch on to Subutex but don't want to put myself in a mental hospital thinking I'm being sucked through the vortex of a spiral (ie severely manic) so I'm indulging that idea with great care. Ie doing absolutely nothing about it for the time being.

Beatrix Potter is on my television. I got the Renee Zellwegger DVD. She's just like me.


Shakespeare's Sonnet 73. Isn't this sublime?

To be or not to be?

Here's what Google Translate made of the famous speech from Shakespeare's Hamlet (English-Chinese Traditional, Back to English, into Thai and back to English again). I swear I never altered a single word, so how "pharmaceutical sciences" got in there I haven't a clue!

In order to survive or is this is a problem.
Whether it is a noble soul.
Slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.
Or, armed with a sea of trouble,.
Opposition and end? Die: sleep;
Sleep and by sleep to say we end.
Heart - thousands of research in pharmaceutical sciences and natural shocks.
Texture those who succeed.
Pious hope that the dead sleep;
Sleep: maybe to dream: it is life threatening;
Death of a dream come true for sleep
When we roll this salad man,.
We need to stop: with respect.
This will cause a disaster for long life;
For those who would bear the whips and scorn of the time.
Oppressors wrong people proud of their disdain,.
Profane love, pain, the laws of the delay.
Office of arrogance and rejection.
The patient is not worth attention,.
But to make your own.
Simple small dagger?

Resolutions!

DO YOU LIKE PRINCESS MARGARET (the late Princess Margaret) with her drink and fag? I was sure every other photo I'd find would have her with drink in one hand, cig in the other: that's how I remember her. Seems in actuality she was more discreet than that - as you can see the rum-&-Coke's been quickly stashed behind her and the fag put down in the bottom of the frame but not quite out of shot... Rumour even had it that Princess Margo's drunken dropped Dunhill that sparked the great Windsor Castle fire of 1992 though Buckingham Palace still vigorously denies this ...

Actually I am writing this on Sunday night the 30th of December. And I am all forlorn and lost-feeling and depressed. Hmmm. Also I've had the heating on and working so very successfully I am now sweltering...

Well, whatever: on to Resolutions.

I don't actually make New Year's resolutions these days, having always believed that just doing things, whatever the time of year is by far the best course of action. Also, January 1st is but an arbitrary date to me. I've always felt my personal New Year began around September - in line with the academic year.

Having said all that, here are some things I'd like to accomplish in 2008:

~ Finish Memoirs
~ Write Baying Gwendolina novel
~ Get 1000 hits a day on blog (as if - I think it would be easier to sell five million books and at least I'd get paid handsomely for that)
~ Learn to cook just like Chinese takeaway (and save £££s)
~ Move out of present craphole where I live (by choice; not eviction)
~ Cease all nonprescribed drugtaking and immoderate drinking
~ Give up smoking

If I manage just one of these I'll call it an achievement; all 7 and it's a genuine miracle!

HAPPY NEW YEAR 2008 EVERYONE!
MAY IT BE FAR BETTER THAN YUKKY OLD 2007!!

Aargh! I am sposed to finish here. And yet the emptiness is killing me. So here's a poem I really like. (From Shakespeare.)

Fear no more the heat of the sun
nor the furious winter's rages;
thou thy wordly task hast done,
home art gone, and ta'en thy wages.
Golden lads and girls all must,
as chimney-sweepers, come to dust.

Fear no more the frown of the great
thou art past the tyrant's stroke.
Care no more to clothe and eat;
to thee the reed is as the oak.
The sceptre, learning, physick must,
as chimney-sweepers, come to dust.

Fear no more the lightning flash,
nor th' all-dreaded thunder-stone;
fear not slander, censure rash;
thou has finished joy and moan.
All lovers young, all lovers must
consign to thee and come to dust.

No exorciser harm thee
nor no witchcraft charm thee!
Ghost unlaid forbear thee;
nothing ill come near thee!
Quiet consumation have
and renownèd be thy grave.

Cymbeline 4:2:259-282


The LORD is my shepherd;
I shall not want.
he makes me lie down in green pastures,
he leads me beside the still waters.
He resores my soul;
he leads me in the paths of righteousness
for his name's sake.

Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death,
I will fear no evil;
for you are with me;
your rod and your staff, they comfort me.

You prepare a table before me in the prescence of my enemies;
you annoint my head with oil;
my cup runneth over.
Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me
all the days of my life;
and I will dwell in the house of God
for ever.

Psalm 23


R: If I profane with my unworthiest hand
this holy shrine, the gentle sin is this:
my lips, two blushing pilgrims, ready stand
to smooth that rough touch with a tender kiss.
J: Good pilgrim, you do wrong your hand too much,
which mannerly devotion shows in this;
for saints have hands that pilgrims' hands do touch,
and palm to palm is holy palmers' kiss.
R: Have not saints lips, and holy palmers too?
J: Aye, pilgrim, lips that they must use in prayer.
R: O, then, dear saint, let lips do what hands do!
They pray; grant thou, lest faith turn to despair.
J: Saints do not move, though grant for prayers' sake.
R: Then move not while my prayer's effect I take. - (they kiss; woo!)

from Romeo and Juliet 1:5:93-106...

After 3am

I KNOW WHAT my real Resolution should be: to have some respect for myself. Because some couple of years ago, feeling suicidal and yet unwilling, when it came to it, to actually perform the act. Though even the train drivers (well, one driver in particular somehow saw into my eyes at 90+ mph. I wasn't being stupid, either. Wasn't acting out or hanging off the edge of the platform.) He just saw my eyes and frantically waved his arms across each other as if to say "DON'T!"

Something else along those lines happened another time.

And I lost all respect formyself. Let everything go. RAtcheted up my beloved bank account, which allowed me a Visa debit card with holographic flying wings, right far past the max until the entire account was suspended on me. I had kept that card through thick and think and the pits of homelessness and addiction. It represented my future and a nominal place as a respectable member of society. I was the ONLY junkie I knew who'd managed to hold on to such a relic of past life. Most had never had Visa cards. Because, being fulltime junkies since 18 or even 16, they'd never had jobs or normal lives...

I used to cradle this Visa card in my hand, as I slouched on a damp mattress all alone by flickering candle light in a raindripping cavern of an abandoned industrial building. I would tilt the card and watch the birdie flying free.

While I lived out this subterranean life...

And every day, when I woke I felt like I was lying face-down on the pavement, banging my head on the ground. "This does not work. I cannot do this any more."

And so I hit rock bottom every day. And yet lived on.

FOR MY SINS.

***

Video of the Day:
Queens' Speeches Go International -
This one is the:
Dutch Queen's Speech!!

***

I was going to post lots more blarble but I've got Thai chicken babycorn egg fly lice wafting mysterious oriental aromas out of a plastic bag so I must go back and devour it!!

***

Meanwhile, New Year has kicked off in Australia, New Zealand and many South Sea Islands already. It's nine minutes to 5pm as I write... Japan to get it very soon... America and Canada, you are still late morning in New York and the eastern seaboard; not even 9am in Vancouver and LA...

I will not be able to get to everybody's pages in time to say this individually, so I'll say it again here:-

HAVE A MARVELLOUS 2008 EVERYBODY!!!

STOP PRESS ~ 19/01/10 ~ someone put the most disgusting picture on my hyperlink here. If you click on this you either get needle and candle or a starfish. (Clue: not sea variety...)