Auntie's Anti-Poems

Hi Auntie. With regard to Ekphrasis, I'm fairly sure I commented before, but if I didn't I certainly should have. I love this poem as much as I love the picture. It flows so well and it's brushstrokes are as mticulous as the artists.

I like your latest offering too. It has such good pace and rhythm and is an appropriate offering for the end of the year. one thing I might suggest though that you replace that (S1 L8) with whose. As it is the hopes seem to be free floating and I feel that if they belonged to the afore mentioned men it would make marginally more sense.

A lovely sonnet though, with an echo of Grey's Ellergy in luring the day "toward an early end."

Thoroughly enjoyed. Thank you


Live and be well - H

Thank you, Prince, Bar, and Hawkman for your kind responses to this thing.
It's a mere extended metaphor, "violently yoking" two "disparate" concepts together, the contemporary modern energy grid with ancient rituals revolving around the Winter Soltice. Chose the Italianate form in an attempt to get the volta, along with a conscious effort to use hard consonants found in the languages of Northern Europe. Those Latin roots have a way of sneaking in, though, as well as one from the Greek--kosmos.

Again, I'm grateful for the three of you for sharing your critical expertise and please accept my warmest wishes of the season.

Auntie

Deleting History

Amid stony suspicion
and core-deep fear
neo-Luddites fail to grasp
the brazenness of cyber magic
flouting the laws of physics.

How delightfully unnatural
for somebody to occupy two spaces
at once: mind and senses in Manchester
while cozily posed–-still here!--
on a basement chair in Sheboygan.

Any tracks, like elongated footprints
in the snow, will follow the hot demand
to disappear– pfft! - as if they’d never
planted themselves anywhere before.

Likewise that mysterious term “Restore”
can cast a spell poised to hearken
to an earlier date. Time
Travel sans a wormhole or a rocket,
but “retro” just the same.

Oh, if only to re-set this little life!
If only to blank up the platform
for a miraculous restart,
escaping the bio fallacies,
every eggy-faced bêtise,
the ego slammed by a thousand
invitations lost in the mail
and opportunities which failed to load,
the cache of gold that shunned this fool
it took for Kryptonite or virus-borne Plague.

What if this oddly alchemic mix
of silicon, algorithms, and wire
could squelch Joyce’s nightmare,
to wake up from the bad dream
copying files every blessed day?

Who wouldn’t want to witness
such a liberating End,
solidly free of cataclysm
as it opens up a future
with hopelessness scrubbed clean?

With just one click,
watch the green segments

race across the narrow box
going, going --

An original New Year poem Auntie :D Ah, that miracle of absolution, Cntrl> Alt, Delete! thus may one pass through the beaded gates of silicone heaven shriven and pure , unencumbered by regret or the burden of our sins - lol Trouble is, one throws out the baby with the bathwater. The more advanced the computer, or the older one gets, there just so much more to back up!

Live and be well - H

I have read and re-read your poem Auntie and some of it still remains a bit cryptic to me (perhaps only to me.. - like:

"escaping the bio fallacies,
every eggy-faced bêtise,"

or S3???)

though I did get the sigh towards the end, as you would expect it, I believe.

This stanza spoke to me beautifully:


What if this oddly alchemic mix
of silicon, algorithms, and wire
could squelch Joyce’s nightmare,
to wake up from the bad dream
copying files every blessed day?

It is always challenging and rewarding to read you Auntie, it forces one to ponder your personal questioning which reflects something of the universal and which we can't, as you masterly do, put it into words.

Thank you a lot and - a happy new year to your and around you!

Bar

I enjoy a good cryptic crossword Auntie ( BTW I have never asked why Auntie and not Aunty?) (Or maybe thats an angloamerican thing, with your fawcetts and your drapes etc).Anyway, I digress, you are an artiste Ms Shecky (could i ask your age and your marital status?) (ungentlemanly I know, but you have read my stuff) I enjoy reading you, for I know from my time here that I am in the company of a craftswoman and like others I greatly enjoy your analysis when you choose to comment. You have also taken a laid back approach when I have choosen to take the piss and for these reasons I have grown to appreciate your prescence here. Shall we get a room? lol. Hold on, back to the poem, I got the delete to trash type references, but overall sooooo cryptic I could be blowing sand from egyptian scribblings. There is nothing wrong in that, I for one enjoy reading something I know I will never decipher as when you write it I know it has a meaning I am just not getting. More power to your elbow Auntie and please, pretty please answer my questions.
best wishes
jerryB

Thinking & Talking


Think about a woodland pool
beneath leaves gone or green or bronzed.
Talk about how sun, air, and water
all blend to nurture life’s beginnings.

Think of nourishing bits and sweets
captured hard. Then talk about
what’s left to savor
beyond chewy clouds of bread.

Hearthstone reliefs and lights;
a touch of warm, familiar flesh
both firm and soft, both to and from
our mirrored selves, full-grown or small:
think and talk about all these.

Think about corporeal cuts
and a stiffness in the soul.
Talk about buoyant breath
and liberated pain.

Think & talk, talk & think,
think, think & talk some more.

Though some may declaim
against the limits of thought,
and damn endless speech,
its cheapness and its glare,
preferring baseless feelings
and free-floating affects
without cause or cure–
while prizing the mindless noise
of Action! above all--

keep thinking, keep talking.

For each cottage comfort
and showy manse, every ill
that ever met repair, and all
machinery and lore running
round the earth,

think & talk & talk & think
think & think & think about how
anything & everything begins:

thinking & talking,
talking & thinking.

Hi Auntie.

There's a lot to like in here, particularly Stanzas 3,4, 6 and 9. S 1 has a few punctuation problems: Line 2 needs a comma after 'leaves', as it reads awkardly as is, and line 3 doesn't need a comma after 'and'.

I find the refrain:

"Think & talk, talk & think,
think, think & talk some more."

over stated in the think department. I feel sure that by cutting the first think in the second line of this it would improve the flow somewhat. Same goes for penultimate verse.

As for the poem itself, the overall reflective tone has a delightful dreaminess, but also an edge. This contrast works well, I feel. As I said, lots to like.

Live and be well - H

Aunty! dear Aunty! Except for the intelligence and feeling that runs through this, I would hardly recognize that it was by you! There's something somewhat more free about it, more uncaring about the strictures of rhyme or rhythm...

It's wonderful, so thoughtful, so... confiding.

I loved S2 Aunty and after reading some of ramblings in a certain sophisticated thread, I was particularly taken by this poem. I love the urging nature of this piece and snatches of thought.

Thank you Prince, Hawk, and dear Delta for weighing in on this thing.


As a way of 'splainin': I see how an appositive situation might occur in l.2; however, I deliberately left out the comma, maybe to keep open a possible ambiguous shading for "leaves," which then fades with the little series that follows, a participle accompanied by two adjectives already separated by an "or"; hence, no comma needed.

As to the repetition of "think"-- fully intended to have more weight, in a quantitative way, to establish its supremacy over "talk." Yes, both form a partnership, but not 50/50, more like 40/60 or 25/75. Though the product may appear to some as desultory, I did try to be diligent about the word choice, and to my fractured mind, at least, can justify the presence of every single one. For instance, there was a reason for "corporeal" rather than "corporal" that has nothing to do with the extra syllable. Same with "machinery" and "lore" (rather than learning or wisdom or law, the latter pronounced similarly to "lore" in this here neck o' th' woods.

Thanks again, though, for the constructive, thoughtful criticism which I do appreciate greatly.

I have just savoured it all, dear Auntie, I read it as an ardent/urgent appeal for communication between us humans... I'm also reminded of how Word was at the beginning and how, once uttered, it became World!

Love to read you always, dear Auntie!!! Thank you for your inspiring words!

Good thoughts from Bar

Hello Auntie Fawcett Majors. I read this in two opposing ways both of which are probably wrong. I read it first as a percieved uselessness of thinking and thinking and talking doomed by inevitability (that may well just be me .. lol) and secondly as somebody giving advice (maybe a kindly aunty) to think more and to take time to do so.

Had me thinking so thought I would talk to you about it :D
cheers
JerryB

Thank you, Bar and Jerry. Bar you came very close to one of the intended aims of this thing. Jerry your second interpret. aligns with that of yours fooly.

PS -- "Fawcett Majors" ? "Tis not the double-surname of the long-maned actress? I was flattered until I remembered that a couple of years she went to the other realm, the Great
Vault of Syndicated Action TV Shows in the Sky.

‘Bye Lines


It seems I'll never smoke enough
to spark success. I need a puff
of what it takes to write this stuff:

epics with a Nibelung ring,
bacchant bachelors on a fling,
well-tooned penguins who dance and sing;

chicks lit up by some guy’s bright eye,
the worldly wiles of a novel spy,
a twisty whodunit? (Not I.)

Sharp how-tos for investment tools,
show biz tell-alls, cable news fools,
vampires, zombies,* teen wizards, ghouls:

none quite fits my creative quirk.
Guess I'm just the wrong type of jerk,
not cut out for this line of work.






* Except for "Zombies on Ice"