You're Beautiful

You're Beautiful because you're classically trained. ,
I'm ugly because I associate piano wire with strangulation. 
You're beautiful because you stop to read the cards in newsagents' windows about lost cats and missing dogs.
I'm ugly because of what 1 did to that jellyfish with a lolly-stick and a big stone 
You're beautiful because for you, politeness is instinctive, not a marketing campaign
I'm ugly because desperation is impossible to hide. 

Ugly like he is,
Beautiful like hers,
Beautiful like Venus,
Ugly like his,
Beautiful like she is,
Ugly like Mars. 

You're beautiful because you believe in coincidence and the power of thought.
I'm ugly because I proved God to be a mathematical impossibility 
You're beautiful because you prefer home-made soup to the packet stuff.
I'm ugly because once, at a dinner party, I defended the aristocracy and wasn't even drunk. 
You're beautiful because you can't work the remote control.
I'm ugly because of satellite television and twenty-four hour rolling news. 

Ugly like he is,
Beautiful like hers,
Beautiful like Venus,
Ugly like his,
Beautiful like she is,
Ugly like Mars. 

You're beautiful because you cry at weddings as well as funerals.
I'm ugly because I think .of children as another species from a different world. 
You're beautiful because you look great in any colour including red.
I'm ugly because I think shopping is strictly for the acquisition of material goods. 
You're beautiful because when you were born, undiscovered planets lined up to peep over the rim of your cradle and lay gifts of gravity and light at your miniature feet.
I'm ugly for saying 'love at first sight' is another form of mistaken identity and that the most human of all responses is to gloat. 

Ugly like he is,
Beautiful like hers,
Beautiful like Venus,
Ugly like his,
Beautiful like she is,
Ugly like Mars. 

You're beautiful because you've never seen the inside of a car-wash,
I'm ugly because I always ask for a receipt. 
You're beautiful for sending a box of shoes to the third world.
I'm ugly because I remember the telephone numbers of ex-girlfriends and the year Schubert was born. 
You're beautiful because you sponsored a parrot in a zoo.
I'm ugly because when I sigh it's like the slow collapse of a circus tent. 

Ugly like he is,
Beautiful like hers,
Beautiful like Venus,
Ugly like his,
Beautiful like she is,
Ugly like Mars. 

You're beautiful because you can point at a man in a uniform and laugh.
I'm ugly because I was a police informer in a previous life. 
You're beautiful because you drink a litre of water and eat three pieces of fruit a day.
I'm ugly for taking the line that a meal without meat is a beautiful woman with one eye. 
You're beautiful because you don't see love as a competition and you know how to lose.
I'm ugly because I kissed the FA Cup then held it up to the crowd. 

You're beautiful because of a single buttercup in the top buttonhole of your cardigan.
I'm ugly because I said the World's Strongest Woman was a muscleman in a dress. 
You're beautiful because you couldn't live in a lighthouse.
I'm ugly for making hand-shadows in front of the giant bulb, so when they look up, the captains of vessels in distress see the ears of a rabbit, or the eye of a fox, or the legs of a galloping black horse. 

Ugly like he is,
Beautiful like hers,
Beautiful like Venus,
Ugly like his,
Beautiful like she is,
Ugly like Mars. 

Ugly like he is,
Beautiful like hers,
Beautiful like Venus,
Ugly like his,
Beautiful like she is,
Ugly like Mars.


[...]

'Once I've read that poem in a little pub, and a lady came to me afterwards and said 'Don't worry, I'm ugly as well.''



(Simon Armitage)

***

I appreciate how simplicity can turn very complex as you dare to dive inside the words. Furthermore it challenges the reader to create your own couplet as as extension of the poem.

Its unbelievable how a binary themed poem turns into the disambiguation of the binary structures themselves.



Simon Armitage is delicately blitzing the world.

Bereft

"A veces imagino lo maravilloso que sería que me llamases sólo porque sí, simplemente como alguien que tiene sed y bebe un vaso de agua, pero eso ya sé que es pedirte demasiado, nunca finjas conmigo una sed que no sientas."—José Saramago, El Hombre Duplicado.


'[...] 

He was just drifting slowly off when Maria da Paz came and whispered in his ear, How wonderful it would be if you were to phone me just because you felt like it. She would probably have said the rest of the sentence too, but he had already got out of bed, pulled on his dressing gown over his pajamas and was dialing her number. Maria da Paz asked Is that you, and he replied, Yes, it’s me, I was thirsty and I’ve come to ask for a glass of water.' —José Saramago, The Double.

― Virginia Woolf, 'On Being Ill'

“Consider how common illness is, how tremendous the spiritual change that it brings, how astonishing, when the lights of health go down, the undiscovered countries that are then disclosed, what wastes and deserts of the soul a slight attack of influenza brings to view, what precipices and lawns sprinkled with bright flowers a little rise of temperature reveals, what ancient and obdurate oaks are uprooted in us by the act of sickness, how we go down in the pit of death and feel the waters of annihilation close above our heads and wake thinking to find ourselves in the presence of the angels and the harpers when we have a tooth out and come to the surface in the dentist's arm-chair and confuse his "Rinse the mouth-rinse the mouth" with the greeting of the Deity stooping from the floor of Heaven to welcome us - when we think of this, as we are so frequently forced to think of it, it becomes strange indeed that illness has not taken its place with love and battle and jealousy among the prime themes of literature” 

[...]

“Finally, to hinder the description of illness in literature, there is the poverty of the language.  English, which can express the thoughts of Hamlet and the tragedy of Lear, has no words for the shiver and the headache.  It has all grown one way.  The merest schoolgirl, when she falls in love, has Shakespeare or Keats to speak her mind for her; but let a sufferer try to describe a pain in his head to a doctor and language at once runs dry.  There is nothing ready made for him.  He is forced to coin words himself, and, taking his pain in one hand, and a lump of pure sound in the other (as perhaps the people of Babel did in the beginning), so to crush them together that a brand new word in the end drops out.  Probably it will be something laughable.” 

Poundland

Came we then to the place abovementioned,
crossed its bristled threshold through robotic glass doors,
entered its furry heat, its flesh-toned fluorescent light.
Thus with wire-wrought baskets we voyaged,
and some with trolleys, back wheels flipping like trout tails,
cruised the narrow canyons twixt cascading shelves,
the prow of our journeying cleaving stale air.
Legion were the items that came tamely to hand:
five stainless steel teaspoons, ten corn-relief plasters,
the Busy Bear pedal bin liners fragranced with country lavender,
the Disney design calendar and diary set, three cans of Vimto,
cornucopia of potato-based snacks and balm for a sweet tooth,
toys and games, goods of Orient made, and of Cathay,
all under the clouded eye of CCTV,
beyond the hazard cone where serious chutney spillage had occurred.
Then emerged souls: the duty manager with a face like Doncaster,
mumbling, “For so much, what shall we give in return?”
The blood-stained employee of the month,
sobbing on a woolsack of fun-fur rugs,
many uniformed servers, spectral, drifting between aisles.
Then came Elpenor, our old friend Elpenor,
slumped and shrunken by the Seasonal Products display.
In strangled words I managed,
“How art thou come to these shady channels, into hell’s ravine?”
And he: “To loan sharks I owe/the bone and marrow of my all.”
Then Walt Whitman, enquiring politely of the delivery boy.
And from Special Occasions came forth Tiresias,
dead in life, alive in death, cider-scented and sock-less,
Oxfam-clad, shaving cuts to both cheeks, quoting the stock exchange.
And my own mother reaching out, slipping a tin of stewing steak
to the skirt pocket of her wedding dress,
blessed with a magician’s touch, practised in need.

But never until the valley widened at the gated brink
did we open our lips to fish out those corn-coloured coins,
those minted obols, hard-won tokens graced with our monarch’s head,
kept hidden beneath the tongue’s eel, blood-tasting,
both ornament and safeguard, of armour made.
And paid forthwith, then broke surface
and breathed extraordinary daylight into starved lungs,
steered for home through precincts and parks scalded by polar winds,
laden with whatnot, lightened of golden quids.

A new poem by Simon Armitage.

The poet, dramatist and broadcaster Simon Armitage is Professor of Poetry at the University of Sheffield. This new poem appears in "Paper Aeroplane: Selected Poems 1989-2014", published on 18 September by Faber & Faber (£14.99)

The Spoken Word

The evening advances, then withdraws again
Leaving our cups and books like islands on the floor.
We are drifting, you and I,
As far from another as the young heroes
Of these two novels we have just laid down.
For that is happiness: to wander alone
Surrounded by the same moon, whose tides remind us of ourselves,
Our distances, and what we leave behind.
The lamp left on, the curtains letting in the light.
These things were promises. No doubt we will come back to them. 

(Hugo Williams, Tides)



I love those conversational, straightforward and almost throwaway poems.
Poems that you end up nodding to and agreeing and sympathising with. Poems that are impossible to imitate, though.

They are as real as real life is.


Sometimes I wonder why on Earth am I doing learning how to divide again. Next year is going to be a tedious and quite challenging one. All in all, up to this moment I am not giving up in my dreams and convictions.

May is a Lonely Rush

Facebook. 

Four phones online, they probably aren't.

24m since last connection. Kk. 

Some of them still. Am I even idle?

Of course I am. Or nobody cares.

Some people do, persons don't. 

You know how this chat business works. Sure.

Spammers. Are people looking for something...?

Amusing to do. Or whatever.

Empty moments. Data fly.

Under the myriad of statuses. Updates.

Second by second, everything changes. 

Anything new. Or alike.

Meanwhile. My Critical Reader. 

Rests on the linen. Dull.

'Pay me attention, I'll be long

but I won't be endless.' Nor would us.

P. V.

***

First draft from a personal brain storm. I have to improve it, though.

Zzzzzzzz

"No, the serpent did not
Seduce Eve to the apple.
All that's simply
Corruption of the facts.

Adam ate the apple.
Eve ate Adam.
The serpent ate Eve.
This is the dark intestine.

The serpent, meanwhile,
Sleeps his meal off in Paradise -
Smiling to hear
God's querulous calling."

(Ted Hughes, Theology)


**

Since I started an internship as well as doing my final year, my life has turned... busy. Psychologically speaking its very fulfilling, physically speaking its kind of shattering. Although, I guess there are certain rules you must abide to enjoy yourself at a party.

My nervous system lives in rush hour and the lack of sleep turns me kind of itchy. I guess the odd weekend I would fall into temptation again, you know... the original sin Milton is obsessed with. How wonderful my poetry lectures are.

Certainly I found myself behaving as if I was younger, just because of them. Sometimes I really think I'm already beginning to turn into a parody of myself, although I am surely gaining a true insight into how I should conduct myself. Who would have thought?

 'Greedily she engorged without restraint, 
 And knew not eating death. Satiate at length
 And heightened as with wine'
(Milton, Paradise Lost, Book IX)

How far is it? How far is it now?

‘But almost every word or combination of words carries unwanted luggage.’

(The Guardian: Teenage Kicks, Simon Armitage)

From Valencia to the UK, via Cardiff

The other day, reading Greg's blog -one of my inspirations at the moment- I just realised of a little nuance.





Link: http://vimeo.com/49854492


**
 



 The world could sometimes be awesome although we are drinking this multi-coloured nonsense that is life.



 "Now I'm ready." (But not really)

“It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.”

A thought on what’s yet to come

"Your brain is as dry as the remainder biscuit after voyage."
(As You Like It)





And so it is my brain.
Writing my final degree dissertation is a tough work. I would like to say the rest is easier, but it just isn't. Anyway I find it rewarding in some way, although I don't have many time to write here... oh, well. I will come back, as always.


In the meantime you can visit my twitter, as it is updated more frequently.

@theescrivener

"Thine face is not worth sunburning."
(Henry V)

Alien smile ::) .

Motion

Movement.