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“Biting's excellent. It's like kissing - only there is a winner.” ― Neil Gaiman, “We should meet in another life - we should meet in air- me and you.” ― Sylvia Plath, Bare and raw punctation, Breathe out, I kissed you like a shipwreck - like one who insufflates the word, I think I would know Nora’s fart anywhere. I think I could pick hers out in a roomful of farting women., I'm deliciously wired I'm falling in a cloud, Poetry, rethreaded and woven tighter and brighter, The eyes have it nailed, We are all made of stars
Sublime stuff, a wonderful lack of punctuation too. One huge expulsion of rawly charged air.
Lovesong – Ted Hughes
He loved her and she loved him.
His kisses sucked out her whole past and future or tried to
He had no other appetite
She bit him she gnawed him she sucked
She wanted him complete inside her
Safe and sure forever and ever
Their little cries fluttered into the curtains
Her eyes wanted nothing to get away
Her looks nailed down his hands his wrists his elbows
He gripped her hard so that life
Should not drag her from that moment
He wanted all future to cease
He wanted to topple with his arms round her
Off that moment’s brink and into nothing
Or everlasting or whatever there was
Her embrace was an immense press
To print him into her bones
His smiles were the garrets of a fairy palace
Where the real world would never come
Her smiles were spider bites
So he would lie still till she felt hungry
His words were occupying armies
Her laughs were an assassin’s attempts
His looks were bullets daggers of revenge
His glances were ghosts in the corner with horrible secrets
His whispers were whips and jackboots
Her kisses were lawyers steadily writing
His caresses were the last hooks of a castaway
Her love-tricks were the grinding of locks
And their deep cries crawled over the floors
Like an animal dragging a great trap
His promises were the surgeon’s gag
Her promises took the top off his skull
She would get a brooch made of it
His vows pulled out all her sinews
He showed her how to make a love-knot
Her vows put his eyes in formalin
At the back of her secret drawer
Their screams stuck in the wall
Their heads fell apart into sleep like the two halves
Of a lopped melon, but love is hard to stop
In their entwined sleep they exchanged arms and legs
In their dreams their brains took each other hostage
In the morning they wore each other’s face
Stunning. Thanks for posting this on your cloud, Esme.
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It’s quite something isn’t it? Glad you enjoyed it that much, I think it really packs a punch wordage-wise. Thanks for the comment Tish.
Esme agreeing with Tish upon the Cloud.
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It’s quite a battleground isn’t it, a carnage of carnality. I had to come back again this morning to re-read. I dreamt last night I’d discovered a collection of Ted Hughes’ works in the house – a book I don’t actually own. (Most remiss). And I was so pleased because it meant I could read this poem again. But it wasn’t there when I woke. So instead, I have returned most gratefully to your cloud 🙂
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‘a carnage of carnality’ – Love that. The words were drawing you back, lasooed in the night by them no less. I’ve had similar happen after reading poetry that strikes me; it doesn’t leave for a while, and I end up revisiting it again very soon.
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Oooh. Ice bun gratefully received on this 5* cloud.
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Very Jackie Collins 😀
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Yes I can see the connection
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It reminds me of my favourite poem by Margaret Atwood –
You fit into me
Like a hook into an eye
A fish hook
An open eye
🙂
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Ah yes, I’m a huge fan of Margaret’s, you’ve reminded me of this one now, I particularly love the line – ‘You are innocent as a bathtub full of bullets.’
Backdrop addresses cowboy
BY Margaret Atwood.
Starspangled cowboy
sauntering out of the almost-
silly West, on your face
a porcelain grin,
tugging a papier-mâché cactus
on wheels behind you with a string,
you are innocent as a bathtub
full of bullets.
Your righteous eyes, your laconic
trigger-fingers
people the streets with villains:
as you move, the air in front of you
blossoms with targets
and you leave behind you a heroic
trail of desolation:
beer bottles
slaughtered by the side
of the road, bird-
skulls bleaching in the sunset.
I ought to be watching
from behind a cliff or a cardboard storefront
when the shooting starts, hands clasped
in admiration,
but I am elsewhere.
Then what about me
what about the I
confronting you on that border,
you are always trying to cross?
I am the horizon
you ride towards, the thing you can never lasso
I am also what surrounds you:
my brain
scattered with your
tincans, bones, empty shells,
the litter of your invasions.
I am the space you desecrate
as you pass through.
Thank you for that Carmen! – Esme loving the teeth and bones of such words along with Carmen upon the Cloud
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Another good one!
There are many Margaret Atwood fans in our family. (She has family ties to our area of Nova Scotia). In fact, we have a granddaughter named after her!
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Oh, how fab! She’s a brilliant writer, ‘Oryx and Crake’ is one of my favourite books, so skillfully put together.
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Never read much of Hughes. Overshadowed, I guess. Good one. 😘
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I hadn’t before this either, I’m glad you like it dearie ❤
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drip…drip…drip… 😝🙈😊😘
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Ooh, it’s a bit cynical, isn’t it?
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Do you think? I don’t find it so, I think it an absolutely cracking actual love song. It’s a howl, and roar, it’s all primaeval sex on a stick and joyous. The last line is brilliant. It’s strange how poems strike people so differently, and definitely one of the reasons I love the medium so much.
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I think it is, yes.
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Why?
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Well, just look at what he’s saying . . . I can only imagine it’s at least in part a reflection of his dysfunctional and obsessional relationship with Plath. See what Bela thinks, she’ll likely know.
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Their history is well documented, and yes, very dysfunctional, I see the obsession part. Bela has already commented, she liked it well enough. It doesn’t seem a negative piece, they will have had their joys that were just that, even if experienced separately. Lots of the other ones are sharp-edged mind you. Impossible for them not to be I’d have thought. It took me by surprise when I read this, I was expecting something darker, serrated.
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The collision of pronouns in this powerful poem conveys for me the forceful impact of particles in a Hadron Collider. I envision each pronounal pair as hefty as the oeuvre that survives the Sylvia-Ted marriage. Each passing pair deserves a voluminous heft of her/his own, where the book’s first word and the book’s last word each tear/tear off, gain speed, and meet in the middle, creating and destroying like a supernova. We witness from a not-so-safe distance.
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I was going to select some of that, then realised I’d be getting it all really, so shall just go with, good show Bill, beautifully captured, held in place by you there. And I agree, I don’t think it’s very safe either. – laughs. Thank you very much indeed.
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Thank you so very very for the kind compliment, Esme. 100% quotability is a cloud-level achievement by any meaningful measure.
I am placing your kind reply in my memento collection: not, of course, to be mistaken with me Mentos® baskette.
Whisping and whistling while wandering along the banks of esmeal clouds, where it is always safe to witness.
🙂 ❤ 🙂
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What in interesting list Bill! I’m going to pick through them all and I have a friend who will absolutely love each and every one, so thank you, good sir, you are clearly another ‘Brill Bill’. Thank you also for your patience with Esme for her slow sorting through comments, I don’t like posting any left until I am able to reply at the same time. Also, this keeps the nuts in line, hahahahaha.
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Hi Esme, So fine to find friends of Paul Rhymer out there. Vic and Sade, particularly the earlier productions, are incomparable snapshots of an era that always fascinates me. I’ve a soft spot for old time radio and am so pleased to read that you’ve “a friend who will absolutely love each and ever one” 🙂
Well, now I’ve talked myself into writing about my discoveries: all within easy reach via my steampunked time machine of course, as soon as I am able to replace the burned out vacuum tubes that drive the danged thing 🙂 ❤ 🙂
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Steampunk liners are a bugger for the tubes going, aren’t they? My own has been patched so many times it’s twice as heavy as it used to be, but I have upgraded tubes this year so am fast as a flea these days.
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Punctuation reduced to the role of eidolon, passion rendered raw, inscribing the ineffable… ah, it’s poetry.
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It’s poetry
anyone can see
it will set you free
unless you’re midway through . . . an ineffable wee. – bows and hands the words over to him in a big bowl (not a toilet bowl)
Thank you Dear Wiz.
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Bill, my Aussie son-in-law would say that comment of yours was ‘brill’. . .. 🙂
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He must live round the back of the Cloud then as Esme says that a lot too. ‘Brill bill’, I like it, hahahaha.
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Here I am whisping (a fine word when Clouding) again. New name cards are on order at an apocryphal printer “half-way up in the next the block” here. They are to include “Brill Bill”, I am imagining. A phenomename, that’s what it is 🙂
http://paulrhymer.net/scripts.cgi
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Hi Carmen! Thank you most gratefully for sharing the other-side-o-the-planet expression. “Brilliant” is an adverb that is not used often enough in this corner of the globe. I try my best to bring into the conversation, but to hardly an avail so far. Now, however, as Esme eclectically suggests, I intend to add “Brill Bill” to my appellation collection. And, by dint of a bit of geographic datum I live at the westernmost edge of Appalachia. How about that for serendipity and synchronicity!
Thanks again, Carmen. Now I must thank Esme for sharing her cloud with the likes of so many interesting fellow Earthlings 🙂
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In a word.. phroar!! Xx
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Get down Shep!
Hahahahaha. I think that word does sum it up pretty well though.
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