[RCL]

Proof
that
there
is no
intelligent
design
of the
uni
verse:

Hu
man
Be
ings

[RCL]

Don’t Need Her Help

After Michael Drayton, Idea 61

You hate my art! You tear it all apart.
Go away, we’re through, just let me be.
You’ve always been a challenge to my heart,
a sneaky and snide nemesis for me.
Buzz off and stay away, sing to crows.
Do ignore me if we meet again.
And please! No sorry reconciling pose,
for I would never bother to explain
how your fecklessness has soured the breath
I use to form in verse what might reprise
the love conceits you say are “done-to-death,”
countering your reckless and specious lies.
Carnal Cupid knows we’re finally over
and helps this Muse-free sonneteer recover.

[RCL]

“Iago is the most honest character in the play.”
—W.H. Auden quoted by James Fenton, New York Review (2000)

Honest Iago’s Villanelle
After W. Shakespeare, Othello

Come on, come on; you are pictures out of doors,
Saints in injuries, devils when offended.
But then again, I think you are all whores.

It plucks out brains and all; but my muse labours
If you be fair and wise, fairness and witted.
And even so, you’re pictures out of doors.

Bells in your parlours, wild cats in kitchen chores
Or on your backs, your appetites are fed.
An honest man would call you honest whores.

You coyly hide from Venice rotten cores
And find a white that will your blackness wed,
So are proper as pictures out of doors.

Hussies you be to sell your sweetest stores,
Players in housewifery, and housewives ill-bred.
An honest man must call you honest whores.

Filth, thou liest—all villainous paramours!
You rise to play and go to work in bed.
Come on, come on; you’re mere pictures out of doors.
But then again, I know you are all whores.

S5 housewives: hussies, whores

All but a few of these words were spoken by Iago.

[RCL]

Exultation is the Going

Exultation is the going
Of clots inside of me -
Past the organs -
Past the navel -
Into a sluggish Sea -

Those never regular or fluid,
The Constipated, understand
There’s divine intoxication
When their loads explode and land.

after Emily Dickinson
Franklin, 143

[RCL]

When I Died

After Emily Dickinson (591)

I heard a Flybot when I died
That loudly Buzzed around the room -
It glittered Blue up in the air
just like the Flies in my Pop’s barn -

There were no saddened eyes to dry -
Not even mine - as buzzed the Flybot -
Its mission was to do me in
Right here - upon this prison cot -

I hadn’t Shit to sign away -
Or Innards ready for transplants -
But I heard that Flybot buzz
And then I coughed out final pants -

Buzzing - the Flybot poked around
The loose and softer flesh of me -
And after injecting its Nanobomb
Nothing of me was left to see -

[John Isbell]

On Never Looking into Chapman’s Homer


Here is another thing I’ve never done
in my fifty-two years. I’ve traveled some
in realms of gold – as John Keats did – and seen
at least one kingdom. And by that, I mean
Great Britain. I have seen the Most Serene
Republic, where the starlings cut the clean
blue air above the campanile. One
might say I’ve been to Europe, but the sum
of all I’ve seen is not equivalent
to Keats’s thrill of recognition, bent
above his books like Herschel at his glass
to read Homer in English. Not one cent
of mine has gone on Chapman, not a brass
farthing. I’ve spent more time eating grass.
 

[Ann Drysdale]

When I have Fears.

When Keats had fears that he might “cease to be”
before he’d written all his mind could hold,
he recognised that his infirmity
might rob him of the chance of growing old.
The lucky youngster never lived to see
coevals gradually lose their grip
on memory, on personality
and the last precious dregs of scholarship.
He never got to watch the tragedy
of shared affairs no longer making sense
between good friends, nor feel the absentee
tottering into total nescience,
so he could not have understood that what
I’m most afraid of is that I might not.

[John Isbell]

Very nice, Ann! I like the relentless rhyme on -ee.

Ralph, I see you've returned to Emily! I visited her home in Amherst, where my sister told me Dickinson used to lower gingerbread from her window to the local children. I liked that.

Cheers,
John

[RCL]

Bravo!! John and Ann

Many have been inspired by Keats' sonnets. Here is my second published poem, as a book review!

On First Looking into Sheehy’s New Passages

Much have I traveled where no man grows old,
And many winsome girls and women seen;
Round many L.A. pool sides have I have been
Which bards in fealty to Narcissus hold.
Oft of middlescence had I been told
That sharp-eyed Erickson made his domain;
Yet did I never feel its edge so keen
Till I heard Sheehy speak out loud and bold:
Then felt I like some surfer of dark skies
When a new starlet swims into his ken;
Or like Hugh Hefner when with bloodshot eyes
He retreating sirens scanned--and his limp men
Looked at each other with a mild surmise--
Silent, atop Disney’s cold Matterhorn.

Los Angeles Times, Book Reviews (8/13/1995)

It later morphed into “On Last Looking into Hefner’s Playboy”

[John Isbell]

Very nice indeed, Ralph! Thanks for sharing.

Cheers,
John