So few of us have met face-to-face that I thought it might be fun to give out some descriptions. No photos; verse only. (Sorry, Art & Fiction folk.)

--CS

Picture Larry Fine
without the tonsured pate.
His frizz is much like mine
but less orbiculate.

If Brad Pitt were better aged,
and thin on top, and red veins raged
across his eyeballs, and the bags
that hung below them, scrotum-like,
were like the fat-filled, flaccid sags
around his middle; and the psych-
opathic anger, barely caged,
shone through a fringed white beard’s debris:
then you begin to picture me.


[This message has been edited by Michael Cantor (edited June 21, 2006).]

Me

Tout court?
I'm short.

. . . And if J. Lo were even meatier,
a gringa, and dinero-needier;
if she wore trifocals and Dr. Scholls,
had bunions, spaced front teeth and several moles;
was older by a quarter century,
why, you would say she looked a lot like me!

Catherine Chandler

.

[This message has been edited by Mary Meriam (edited November 23, 2006).]

I am Madonna, lovely in my cones,
When small birds grumble I kabbalah them;
Ah, when I moan, I moan more ways than one:
The shapes a bawdy mystic can contain !
Of my choice virtues only rogues should speak,
Or gayish dancers who grew up on leeks,
(I’d have them sing in orgies, cheek to cheek).

How well my muscles flex ! I vogue aloud,
I showed you Sit, Roll Over, and Go Down,
I showed you touch, that undulant strap on;
You suckled meekly from my holy ground;
I was the sickle, you, poor you, my fate,
Embracing all of me for mortal stakes,
(And what prodigious children’s books I make).




[This message has been edited by wendy v (edited June 22, 2006).]

You guys are too funny!

I've been AWOL from my own thread, so I figured I'd better put something up . . .

Blind Date

My type he's not:
Not quite six foot,
And not quite fit,
Not handsome, quite,
(Too much Boy Scout),
Nor really cute
(The grin's too tight),
But still, all right--
Don't call the vet.

He's neither fat
Nor balding, yet.
He stands up straight;
That helps. He's sweet,
And wasn't late.
It's just a date,
It's Friday night,
He's here, we're out--
Girl's gotta eat.




[This message has been edited by Clay Stockton (edited June 30, 2006).]

I am not sure if many readers recognized this as a self-portrait when I posted it on TDE last year. Maybe "he was 50 when I met him" put some off the track - but this was about the age I began to acquire a little self-knowledge. This is more of a psychological rather than physical self-portrait.


Refined


Through extremes of drought and thunder, in the ochre land downunder,
he had spent a life in travel and avoiding family ties.
But despite his constant motion from the bush down to the ocean
and then back the other way, he still could not outrun his sighs.

As he said, he had his reasons to pursue those wandering seasons
through the scrub and open grasslands and the gibber plains from hell;
when his dearest friend and lover had betrayed him and another
man had taken to their bed he said " I need to take a spell".

But the spell had taken over, turning him into a rover
and depriving him of hope that he could ever settle down;
he was in its ghastly clutches and it drove him into hutches
where you wouldn't keep a dog and so he kept on moving round.

And on all the tracks he travelled, whether tarmac, dirt or gravelled,
he was always running into men, he said, who'd gone like him;
men turned bitter, gnarled and rugged, men who said they "can't be buggered"
taking any time to worry at the bone of "fitting in".

He was fifty when I met him, but at first I didn't get him,
and in fact I thought he might have been a weirdo or a thief.
But beyond his sad confusion, broken hopes and disillusion,
I could also see the substance of the soul that's born from grief.

Some might think it was a pity that he ever left the city
just to stumble through those deserts of his hopelessness and pain;
but perhaps his greatest blessing came with all those long distressing
journeys, lost and broke and lonely in the sun and dust and rain.


------------------


[This message has been edited by Mark Allinson (edited June 22, 2006).]

Clay, I'll go for concision here:

SINGLE CAUCASIAN MALE

Brown hair, brown eyes, ten fingers and ten toes,
Full set of teeth, a long, Germanic nose.
He doesn't make the lovely ladies wet--
But hey, he's thirty, single, and a het!

[This message has been edited by Quincy Lehr (edited June 22, 2006).]