Reply to: Friday Poetry Corner

[WageSlave]

The Second Coming

TURNING and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

-W.B. Yeats

[AlfredJPruffock]

My goodness boys and girls still reading the Friday Poetry Corner are we ?
Soon it will be way by our beditmes, but on a night like this ...


On a Night like this
Can set the spirit soaring:

After a tiring day
The clockwork spectacle is
Impressive in a slightly boring
Eighteenth-century way.

It soothed adolescence a lot
To meet so shamelesss a stare;
The things I did could not
Be so shocking as they said
If that would still be there
After the shocked were dead

Now, unready to die
Bur already at the stage
When one starts to resent the young,
I am glad those points in the sky
May also be counted among
The creatures of middle-age.

It's cosier thinking of night
As more an Old People's Home
Than a shed for a faultless machine,
That the red pre-Cambrian light
Is gone like Imperial Rome
Or myself at seventeen.

Yet however much we may like
The stoic manner in which
The classical authors wrote,
Only the young and rich
Have the nerve or the figure to strike
The lacrimae rerum note.

For the present stalks abroad
Like the past and its wronged again
Whimper and are ignored,
And the truth cannot be hid;
Somebody chose their pain,
What needn't have happened did.

Occuring this very night
By no established rule,
Some event may already have hurled
Its first little No at the right
Of the laws we accept to school
Our post-diluvian world:

But the stars burn on overhead,
Unconscious of final ends,
As I walk home to bed,
Asking what judgment waits
My person, all my friends,
And these United States.

WH Auden

[EqualOpportunities]

Shame. But I've found the boiler room is a wonderful place to go for a scream. Really helps to relieve the frustration...at least for a few seconds.

Shame indeed. Ah well, not here to make friends are we...

[WageSlave]

Sadly not - not at this office anyway. I thought I was close to finding someone relatively sane in the office, for a minute then.

Shame. But I've found the boiler room is a wonderful place to go for a scream. Really helps to relieve the frustration...at least for a few seconds.

[EqualOpportunities]

EO, is there a weirdo who regularly hangs around the 'garden' of your client?

Sadly not - not at this office anyway. I thought I was close to finding someone relatively sane in the office, for a minute then.

[WageSlave]

Who knows. I was going to suggest that you stand up and mong nnnnnnnnnnnnnnNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnng gggggggggg at the top of your voice, but in honesty it'd probably not be out-of-the-ordinary enough for me to notice.

EO, is there a weirdo who regularly hangs around the 'garden' of your client?

[Chico]

Thanks Chico.

Now I can't stop humming that blasted tune... pass the Led Zeppelin CD quick...

Try this

[EqualOpportunities]

Are you working in my office!?

Who knows. I was going to suggest that you stand up and mong nnnnnnnnnnnnnnNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnng gggggggggg at the top of your voice, but in honesty it'd probably not be out-of-the-ordinary enough for me to notice.

[WageSlave]

Fu ck it all, it's Friday,
What a shile of pite.
My Local Authority Client's a cu nt,
and I can't stand all the spastics, try as I might.

Are you working in my office!?

[EqualOpportunities]

Fu ck it all, it's Friday,
What a shile of pite.
My Local Authority Client's a cu nt,
and I can't stand all the spastics, try as I might.

Fu ck it all, it's Friday,
Why do we have to work?
Even the cripple in the electric wheelchair looks pissed off,
and all he can do is smirk.

Fu ck it all, it's Friday,
This job's easy; I come and I go.
I deliver on time, and to them that's sublime,
thank fu ck, my day rate, few know.

Fu ck it all, it's Friday,
I feel like a right good drink.
Which is odd even by my standards,
as I had enough last night to make the Queen Mary sink.

Fu ck it all, it's Friday,
Bo11ocks to it, I'm off in a bit.
I'll be on the M1 til about fcuking midnight,
that'll teach me for posting this sh1t.

EqualOpportunities 1979 - 2008 (Predicted)

[PRC1964]

Believe I am what I say I am simply because I say,
“I am”!
Do not question me.
Never ask me why!
Only...believe that I love you.
And believe that I care.
Believe that I know what’s best for you.
And believe that I’m there.

Now, Bow down to me,
Die for me,
Devote your life to me,
Do all that you do- for me,
But never question me,
Never ask me why!
Demand no proof!
Believe that I would never hurt you.
And that your blindness is a virtue.
Believe I am what I say I am simply because I say,
“I am”!

[nobody here but us chicke]

Aubade

Really more of a Monday morning poem:

I work all day, and get half-drunk at night.
Waking at four to soundless dark, I stare.
In time the curtain-edges will grow light.
Till then I see what's really always there:
Unresting death, a whole day nearer now,
Making all thought impossible but how
And where and when I shall myself die.
Arid interrogation: yet the dread
Of dying, and being dead,
Flashes afresh to hold and horrify.

The mind blanks at the glare. Not in remorse
-- The good not done, the love not given, time
Torn off unused -- nor wretchedly because
An only life can take so long to climb
Clear of its wrong beginnings, and may never;
But at the total emptiness for ever,
The sure extinction that we travel to
And shall be lost in always. Not to be here,
Not to be anywhere,
And soon; nothing more terrible, nothing more true.

This is a special way of being afraid
No trick dispels. Religion used to try,
That vast moth-eaten musical brocade
Created to pretend we never die,
And specious stuff that says No rational being
Can fear a thing it will not feel, not seeing
That this is what we fear -- no sight, no sound,
No touch or taste or smell, nothing to think with,
Nothing to love or link with,
The anaesthetic from which none come round.

And so it stays just on the edge of vision,
A small unfocused blur, a standing chill
That slows each impulse down to indecision.
Most things may never happen: this one will,
And realisation of its rages out
In furnace-fear when we are caught without
People or drink. Courage is no good:
It means not scaring others. Being brave
Lets no one off the grave.
Death is no different whined at than withstood.

Slowly light strengthens, and the room takes shape.
It stands plain as a wardrobe, what we know,
Have always known, know that we can't escape,
Yet can't accept. One side will have to go.
Meanwhile telephones crouch, getting ready to ring
In locked-up offices, and all the uncaring
Intricate rented world begins to rouse.
The sky is white as clay, with no sun.
Work has to be done.
Postmen like doctors go from house to house.

[WageSlave]

Broken Dreams

THERE is grey in your hair.
Young men no longer suddenly catch their breath
When you are passing;
But maybe some old gaffer mutters a blessing
Because it was your prayer
Recovered him upon the bed of death.
For your sole sake - that all heart's ache have known,
And given to others all heart's ache,
From meagre girlhood's putting on
Burdensome beauty - for your sole sake
Heaven has put away the stroke of her doom,
So great her portion in that peace you make
By merely walking in a room.
Your beauty can but leave among us
Vague memories, nothing but memories.
A young man when the old men are done talking
Will say to an old man, "Tell me of that lady
The poet stubborn with his passion sang us
When age might well have chilled his blood.'
Vague memories, nothing but memories,
But in the grave all, all, shall be renewed.
The certainty that I shall see that lady
Leaning or standing or walking
In the first loveliness of womanhood,
And with the fervour of my youthful eyes,
Has set me muttering like a fool.
You are more beautiful than any one,
And yet your body had a flaw:
Your small hands were not beautiful,
And I am afraid that you will run
And paddle to the wrist
In that mysterious, always brimming lake
Where those What have obeyed the holy law
paddle and are perfect. Leave unchanged
The hands that I have kissed,
For old sake's sake.
The last stroke of midnight dies.
All day in the one chair
From dream to dream and rhyme to rhyme I have
ranged
In rambling talk with an image of air:
Vague memories, nothing but memories.

-W.B. Yeats

[Dundeegeorge]

D'oh

One of the best known words in the English language by written someone who confessed had broken all of the Ten Commandments.

At when you least cut'n'paste postings make your sense!!!!!

[G8_Summit]

On the Ning Nang Nong

On the Ning Nang Nong
Where the Cows go Bong!
And the Monkeys all say Boo!
Theres a Nang Nong Ning
Where the trees go Ping!
And the tea pots Jibber Jabber Joo
On the Nong Ning Nang
All the Mice go Clang!
And you just cant catch em when they do!
So its Ning Nang Nong!
Cows go Bong!
Nong Nang Ning!
Trees go Ping!
Nong Ning Nang!
The mice go Clang!

What a noisy place to belong,Is the Ning Nang Ning Nang Nong!