Ophelia's Nun

FinsburyParkCarrots · May 2004

Well, there was a note my mate, call him C__ for he really lived, left under his swinging feet for the guy who'd taken over his Sunday afternoon blues session and who'd pushed him out systematically and ruthlessly. I choose not to see it. But I knew what he'd want me to sing for him, putting the words to a song.

Usually I write spontaneously here, but I'm going to include what I wrote at the time, channeling C__ against this other guy's greed. At the next Sunday after C__'s death, his wake, HIS blues jam, I sang this song onstage, with C__'s voice, with his soul, and on his black telecaster, directing in this other 'businessman's' face the message that the man who was really 'dead' was HIM, the guy "still there", the tone-deaf moneyman, and not C__, the musician, whose heart burned on:

Sunday Man, how goes your plan?
You said you were usurper, but in truth I stepped aside.
How's your fun, now? Guess who won?
When you recover from your stupor
You'll have nothing of your pride.

You can keep on demanding the limelight:
You can keep on controlling the lead.
You can make your encores after midnight:
But I know you're dead.

Sunday Man: Did you hear the one
About silence, cunning, exile
and the way to win a war?
So, has it been in the space between
my cameo appearances,
the Joy you'd thought in store?

When you took on the stage, did you feel loved?
Did you see the ghosts out in the wings?
Did you think that you once had the crowd moved?
Or were they moved by other things?

(Instrumental break)

You can keep on demanding the limelight:
You can keep on controlling the lead.
You can make your encores after midnight
But I know you're deaddeaddead.

You know you fail at all that you try to do
You know you fail at all that you try to do
You know you fail at all that you try to do
Yes, you know you fail at all that you try to do

Sunday Man
Sunday Man.....

C__ would have sung that to the man. He passed six years ago today but his presence is alive and angry.

FinsburyParkCarrots · May 2004

Georgey Boy, you're James the First,
And The Patriot Act's your Basilikon Doron
to an heir who'll die before accession,
a would-be Henry the Ninth.
The second son of the war will get your gift
and call out that he's the elect of God
above the Commons. And he'll be routed.
Who knows who'll rule then. People of the land?
Men in leather coats. In time, they'll fall, too,
or just grow tired of killing to bureaucracy.
Then your dynasty will be restored,
The patriots modified.
(Ah, they'll call that the Age of Reason!)
But seriously,
All I know is,
that right now
dissenters are having to equivocate
to protect the holy in safe houses.

Yes, that's enough of prophecies.
Parallels suffice to tell a tale.
So, in sum, then: the point. The point, by gum.
James the First was ruler by default
when the old line seemed to die of apathy.
And he liked to speechify about the divine right of kings
(kings crowned neither by secession nor consensus),
But he really tore the blanket of his rhetoric,
decrying tyrannical usurpers in foreign lands.

So Georgie,
Let's have this Doron, then,
this Pax in proposal,
Tomorrow's pretzel-wrapper.
I'm almost starting to look forward,
Intransitively.
are you?

FinsburyParkCarrots · May 2004

Six thirty nine, and this forum's so quiet.
There's only little old me,
Left to write doggerel, trying to tie it
with rhymes that work well and agree
with basic aesthetics. Isn't it hushed
on this forum? It's Saturday night!
I could write something slowly, or something that's rushed:
Turn out wonders, or turn out pure shite.

I'll turn out the latter!
In ways, it's much better!

FinsburyParkCarrots · May 2004

HERR BRAUMER: Kaspar? Kaspar Hauser? Vatt are you doing viv datt toilet? Vatt are you doing viv zee flush, Kaspar?

(pause)

KASPAR: Venn..I..pee.....and venn I pull zee flush..... zee pee...zatt I can see.... goes away...

HERR BRAUMER: Yessssss, Kaspar.... eento zee drain... outside...

KASPAR: Soooo.... eeet must grow smaller....

because...

I cannot see eeet....

HERR BRAUMER: No, Kaspar... eeet disappears....

KASPAR: Yessss... eeet must... get....smaller.....

HERR BRAUMER: NO!!! Eeeeet stays zee same size! Eeeet just deesappears...eeento ee drain....

KASPAR: And zis drain ees very very small....

HERR BRAUMER: NO!!! Eeeet eeezz outside!!!

KASPAR: Yesss. And zee toilet eeez beeeger than the outside of zee house.

HERR HAUSER: How zee fuck ees zee outside of zee house smaller than eeenside zee toilet, Kaspar?

KASPAR: Because venn I am eenside, I turn all around me, and I only see ziss building.... everywhere. But venn I go outside, I valk around zee outside of zee house, and turn around, and I can see lots of theeengs. So, zee eeenside of zee house eees beeeger zan outside, and zee peee eeenside must get smaller when eeet eees outside. Eeeeet eees log-ic-al. Peee shreeeenks outside.

HERR HAUSER: Errr... no... Kaspar, I theeenk ziss is going to take a leetle beet of work, just yet.

KASPAR: Oh.

FinsburyParkCarrots · May 2004

She doesn't want to be the black-clad, wan
stereotype, wilting at the door,
Mariana-like, wishing her man

Would head back smiling, uniformed, from war.
She won't pull down her shades: she wants the light
To enter through her window, though he's dead.

Because he's gone, she chose to wear her bright
sun-yellow blouse today, the one he often said
he liked the best on her. She steps outside

upon the porch. She knows deep in her heart
it isn't foolishness to think the wide
Beam of golden heat his soul in part,

Holding her once more. Crude sentiment
Is not for her, but here, out from the shade,
the summer sun suggests a firmament

Of Afterness, and promises remade.

FinsburyParkCarrots · May 2004

Pat curls, foetal, on the wet bench.
Rainsoaked, he shivers in his pinstriped suit,
The one he wore when he left Mary,
and he splays the broad red hand
that held the shovel every day for thirty years
over his unshaven face, blacking out the sun.
The sounds of footsteps echo from concrete to steel to wood,
Through his shivering back. The knock of heels
Becomes the boreen trot of Mother's mare
to Corrigan's well, he nine years old, lazy flies
buzzing heavily about the animal's rump
and thudding into his own face. Plodding on the grassy track,
hearing two empty buckets of tin, tied both ends
on a rope across the creature's back slapping her flanks in rhythm,
His eyes flit from the small fence, the main route in,
to a short cut across the bog, head-posied,
Butterfly blazing. Beautiful in a sungleam.
He leads the animal on, hurrying in a happy canter,
humming half broken airs of nameless reels,
wild and laughing at his brilliant idea
To find the spring without the path.

A scream. Nostrils flare. Whinnying snorts and mudsplattering thuds.
A leg caught, deep in wire. Brown eyes askant, teeth bared; A tearing,
a rearing. Buckets hurled, crashing into a ditch.
Pat looking around in the bog for Corrigan himself,
sees heedlessly himself a lifetime ahead,
An image conjured in firing iris:
Going to Holyhead on the ferry with his uncle
and arriving by train to a London fog,
(a city of shiny routes to glory and tripwires),
and seeing "No Irish" in the windows
of suburban guesthouses, along entire streets
When he and Uncle are weary and need to rest
before scouring sites in the morning for ganging work.
He might view a life to come:
Knowing the five o' clock start in the lamplit chill,
Cooking bacon off the shovel for breakfast,
Learning to live in a curving spine, a breaking mind.
Neither Irish nor English anymore: a pair of hands,
a grunt, a spit of cliched insults to the new lad with the barrow,
A barrow he'd himself overstacked with hardcore
for the boy to slip on the plank
running the way up the skip,
as punishment for earnestness
and an aversion to shortcuts.

Losing his work through the gambling,
spending the newfound long days with
Mary in Anne's pub, puking the Guinness pure
come evening with no food in the belly,
Going hard on the bench with the cider
with poor dead O' Ryan:
his heart became his lacerated mare.
He splays his hand over his face, blacking out the sun
But hearing his life in the step of passing shoes,
A step that stops then starts and dies away,
A step he should know still
as Mary's.

DopeBeastie · May 2004

Originally posted by FinsburyParkCarrots
incline your face, your stretched-out mouth again
into the dreampool shoulder-hollow of
her shallow-rising body; now, begin
to coax new honey words, lent from above,
into the godland of a woman’s love

just caught this one...

i like it

FinsburyParkCarrots · May 2004

Thank you, Pasta!

FinsburyParkCarrots · May 2004

Don't ask me why, but I am more moved by frogs on drains than anything else tonight....

A big bulbous throat, blub-bubbling air
Fingers sheathed, glazing in rubbery green
hind legs paired, heart shaped in arching; a stare
of lidless black eyes that a long tongue licks clean:

It's the frogster.
Until it jumped up, I had thought it a leaf.
It's the frogster.
It sat on the gutter then popped underneath.
Hey there frogster!
Tell me this fact as you vacate the scene:
Tell me frogster!
How'd you keep out of view when you're ugly as sin?

Only jokin' tharr,
Beautiful froggy.
Yoooo loveable creatureeeee yoooooooooo.

anOmis · May 2004

Originally posted by FinsburyParkCarrots
Well, there was a note my mate, call him C__ for he really lived, left under his swinging feet for the guy who'd taken over his Sunday afternoon blues session and who'd pushed him out systematically and ruthlessly. I choose not to see it. But I knew what he'd want me to sing for him, putting the words to a song.

Usually I write spontaneously here, but I'm going to include what I wrote at the time, channeling C__ against this other guy's greed. At the next Sunday after C__'s death, his wake, HIS blues jam, I sang this song onstage, with C__'s voice, with his soul, and on his black telecaster, directing in this other 'businessman's' face the message that the man who was really 'dead' was HIM, the guy "still there", the tone-deaf moneyman, and not C__, the musician, whose heart burned on:

Sunday Man, how goes your plan?
You said you were usurper, but in truth I stepped aside.
How's your fun, now? Guess who won?
When you recover from your stupor
You'll have nothing of your pride.

You can keep on demanding the limelight:
You can keep on controlling the lead.
You can make your encores after midnight:
But I know you're dead.

Sunday Man: Did you hear the one
About silence, cunning, exile
and the way to win a war?
So, has it been in the space between
my cameo appearances,
the Joy you'd thought in store?

When you took on the stage, did you feel loved?
Did you see the ghosts out in the wings?
Did you think that you once had the crowd moved?
Or were they moved by other things?

(Instrumental break)

You can keep on demanding the limelight:
You can keep on controlling the lead.
You can make your encores after midnight
But I know you're deaddeaddead.

You know you fail at all that you try to do
You know you fail at all that you try to do
You know you fail at all that you try to do
Yes, you know you fail at all that you try to do

Sunday Man
Sunday Man.....

C__ would have sung that to the man. He passed six years ago today but his presence is alive and angry.

FC, you are a genious!!!

i would love to HEAR you sometime..

like yer music..

coz yer words are awsume

anOmis · May 2004

Originally posted by FinsburyParkCarrots
Pat curls, foetal, on the wet bench.
Rainsoaked, he shivers in his pinstriped suit,
The one he wore when he left Mary,
and he splays the broad red hand
that held the shovel every day for thirty years
over his unshaven face, blacking out the sun.
The sounds of footsteps echo from concrete to steel to wood,
Through his shivering back. The knock of heels
Becomes the boreen trot of Mother's mare
to Corrigan's well, he nine years old, lazy flies
buzzing heavily about the animal's rump
and thudding into his own face. Plodding on the grassy track,
hearing two empty buckets of tin, tied both ends
on a rope across the creature's back slapping her flanks in rhythm,
His eyes flit from the small fence, the main route in,
to a short cut across the bog, head-posied,
Butterfly blazing. Beautiful in a sungleam.
He leads the animal on, hurrying in a happy canter,
humming half broken airs of nameless reels,
wild and laughing at his brilliant idea
To find the spring without the path.

A scream. Nostrils flare. Whinnying snorts and mudsplattering thuds.
A leg caught, deep in wire. Brown eyes askant, teeth bared; A tearing,
a rearing. Buckets hurled, crashing into a ditch.
Pat looking around in the bog for Corrigan himself,
sees heedlessly himself a lifetime ahead,
An image conjured in firing iris:
Going to Holyhead on the ferry with his uncle
and arriving by train to a London fog,
(a city of shiny routes to glory and tripwires),
and seeing "No Irish" in the windows
of suburban guesthouses, along entire streets
When he and Uncle are weary and need to rest
before scouring sites in the morning for ganging work.
He might view a life to come:
Knowing the five o' clock start in the lamplit chill,
Cooking bacon off the shovel for breakfast,
Learning to live in a curving spine, a breaking mind.
Neither Irish nor English anymore: a pair of hands,
a grunt, a spit of cliched insults to the new lad with the barrow,
A barrow he'd himself overstacked with hardcore
for the boy to slip on the plank
running the way up the skip,
as punishment for earnestness
and an aversion to shortcuts.

Losing his work through the gambling,
spending the newfound long days with
Mary in Anne's pub, puking the Guinness pure
come evening with no food in the belly,
Going hard on the bench with the cider
with poor dead O' Ryan:
his heart became his lacerated mare.
He splays his hand over his face, blacking out the sun
But hearing his life in the step of passing shoes,
A step that stops then starts and dies away,
A step he should know still
as Mary's.

another masterpiece
i could relate w/some parts of it!!

anOmis · May 2004

Originally posted by FinsburyParkCarrots
She doesn't want to be the black-clad, wan
stereotype, wilting at the door,
Mariana-like, wishing her man

Would head back smiling, uniformed, from war.
She won't pull down her shades: she wants the light
To enter through her window, though he's dead.

Because he's gone, she chose to wear her bright
sun-yellow blouse today, the one he often said
he liked the best on her. She steps outside

upon the porch. She knows deep in her heart
it isn't foolishness to think the wide
Beam of golden heat his soul in part,

Holding her once more. Crude sentiment
Is not for her, but here, out from the shade,
the summer sun suggests a firmament

Of Afterness, and promises remade.

*sits on her ass reading the poem again*
captured my breath...

FinsburyParkCarrots · May 2004

Hypertext purports to end the long
Monopoly print-editors have had
in choosing what is "right" or what is "wrong"
in early versions that a novel's had.
The argument is this: An editor
Will take a well-known book and look, perhaps
to scrutinise say three, or maybe four
editions of the novel, then collapse
their variants, intending to produce
a "ideal text." But surely this rewrites
A work that's truly fluid and more loose
than school editions show? This thought invites
the question: If you showed us, side by side,
online, all variants, and we applied

our own approach to reading, to prepare
our text that seems definitive, from those
facsimilies presented there, are we
empowered in that we "were those who chose
their ideal version of the text, not some
Professor's?" Well, I have a doubt
about this, really. See, you take a tome
and open it, and there, spotted about
each page are flies. Yes, flies. Now, take your book
and place it underneath a photo lens
to make your site- facsimile. And look
at what you've photographed. The curled and dense
imprint of a small and flattened fly
Becomes a comma to the untrained eye.

So, what you're analysing might mislead
your view. A punctuation stroke
inserted in the right place could succeed
in managing, in syntax, to evoke
a concept disparate from what might be
its meaning if that mark were just left out.
And if the mark's a fly-splat, you will see
a meaning in the text that's there, without
Due reference to that work's history.
So, I'll half-conclude that hypertext
Can't really but select and falsify
its evidence. But still, I'm quite perplexed.
How can we give the readers, us, the wide
Breadth of thought these variants provide?

olderman · May 2004

the writer was deemed to be a genious when the meaning of the work was misinterpreted by the business editor, whose own life was made possible by a bad decision his mother had made..(indeed, she had chosen to have a child with a man who fooled her into thinking that he had a future, when he was no more than a habitual liar and had a horrible secret habit which dried the funds in the college savings account) .. but back to the work.. the stain of the fly caught the editor's eye and changed the meaning of the text .. an advance was made and the editor lost his job when the book did not move and he too succumbed to the horrible habit that was his legacy....

FinsburyParkCarrots · May 2004

Of course, one of the ironies of writing Internet poetry is that one can continue to edit one's posts. So, in the pursuit of a definitive final version of a piece of work, all previous versions get lost, unless another poster reproduces an earlier variant as a "quotation" in a post or, going back to the principles of hard copy, prints it off!

And concerning misinterpretation: there's a famous incident where a literary critic wrote an enthusiastic treatise on the brilliance of the phrase "soiled fish" in a book of Melville's. The phrase was a printer's error: It should have read "coiled fish".

olderman · May 2004

Originally posted by FinsburyParkCarrots
Of course, one of the ironies of writing Internet poetry is that one can continue to edit one's posts. So, in the pursuit of a definitive final version of a piece of work, all previous versions get lost, unless another poster reproduces an earlier variant as a "quotation" in a post or, going back to the principles of hard copy, prints it off!

but the only time you will get a fly stain is when you kill a fly on your screen and decide not to clean it off..

FinsburyParkCarrots · May 2004

Originally posted by olderman
but the only time you will get a fly stain is when you kill a fly on your screen and decide not to clean it off..

The two copies of Shakespeare's 1623 Folio that I've seen are practically decorated with them. It seems that Renaissance readers used Shakespeare for everyday consultation, but only in anticipation of fly spray.

Yellow · May 2004

i put up a poem called nigh end travesty a ways back
lost it
it got deleted...
i found the hand-write
and had to re-write the whole thing to make it presentable again...

very interesting way to mind one's p's and q's...

FinsburyParkCarrots · May 2004

I like that story, Yellow!

Yellow · May 2004

well, it applies, mr. carrots

:):)

*sigh*

i can't believe mods deleted THAT one

lol

Ophelia's Nun

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