A simple prayer, I stick my hand in the air
Letting porte de jambe and its grace
Relive the pain which twitches my face
Relieve the pain which bleeds into space
My hand holds rainbows now
Edward G. Nilges 3 March 2013
Copyright Edward G. Nilges 2013: Moral Rights asserted
Change Record
10 May 2013 Added this change record
10 May 2013 Formatting improvements
He knows what side his bread is butt’rd on
And comes he out of the cold to Firenze,
Florence his mustard and his Grey Poupon
A madness only apparent, a fine frenzy.
Sometimes he sings, and sometimes he dances!
Sometimes he doth naught but shitteth around!
He taketh risks, and finely takes he chances!
Boozing like English-man never an hound!
Never questions he Flo’s talent and skill
His is the older man’s wisdom, never bite
Oh! The delicate hand that feeds ye, Bill
Or Ted or Hank…you know, this, oh Will!
For Florence is Venus and you live at her hest:
You’ve left Earl’s Court for the End that is West!
Edward G. Nilges 5 May 2013
Copyright Edward G. Nilges (c) 2013
Moral Rights asserted
An “Edwardian” sonnet, mine own invention, may have zero, one or more final couplets but it is Shakespearean in its quatrains. Additionally the lines of the final couplets may be Alexandrines but the lines of the quatrains must be iambic pentameters. But note that I’ve broken the quatrain rule here in the last quatrain: it is abaa not abab.
Up, feeling gloriously rested, workout first thing (20 mn supine angel). Waiting for congee, probably finishing Antony and Cleopatra in the Grand High Shakespeare Re-read.
Green tea, no caffeine.
I want this dramatic weight loss (down to 130 lbs/60 kg) to be a breakup of the cancer like ice at dawn and me pooping out the cancer cells, whilst on the battlements, my white blood cells caper, prance and mock the cancer cells while chucking rocks at them. But you never know.
Right you men, don’t cheer, the poor bastards are dying.
Those chairs in Queen Mary’s are truly wonders. As soon as the leg rest was adjusted all pain (the cancer-sciatic pain that has been radiating, off and down, from my left pelvis to me ankle, with sometimes the feeling that a Daemon is pounding my ankle with a cudgel: the wound pain from a bedsore over my L5 lumbar because the bedclothes scrape my butt) disappears.
Subjected the weight loss to a Combined Arms assault last night: a Snickers savor’d slow. A bag of M & Ms ate mostly one at a time. Finally, eight Lindt dark choco squares. All while reading “William Shakespeare: a Textual Companion” by the Oxford Collected Works editorial team. A wonderful text on the ontology and epistemology of editing (“there is” an UrText, being what the author wrote and intended: we may not know it or know that we know it completely but we can approach it and from this help readers understand Shakespeare).
Munch munch choco munch smear smear choco smear. So reading a book in bed in an estaminet in Paris once had the Abigail cleaning the room ask in panic:
Oh! Mon cher Monsieur, qu’est que c’est la, c’est la la merde, le poo poo?
Ah non (dits moi), oh no, ma cher, c’est la chocolat au lait Suisse, yum yum!
Ooooh merci-merci, mon cher Monsieur, c’est vraie, pardonnez-moi!
Cest’rien, ma cherie, mon choux qu j’adore,la plus charmants, doux est belle c’est vous de touts l’Abigails en Paris!
[We break into an Offenbach tune and a can-can]
C’est pas la merde c’est le chocolat!
C’est mon amour c’est pas cafe au lait!
C’est pas l’Oliphant c’est une billet de votre Femme!
You thought you saw an Elephant that practiced on a Fife!
Ho ho ho Monsieur, here is
A letter from your wife!
[Ta da da da da da data data da da data dar um de dum de dum!]
Change Record
9 May 2014 Spelling error correction
Reflections on Durer
The Ritter, the Knight, he travels through the Fog
Attended by his faithful Dog,
Todt, Death, holds aloft and Hour’s Glass
For who ignoreth Him must prove an Ass:
Der horny Teuful, the Devil, follows near
He carries such a frightful spear!
Was it the weapon pierced the side
Of our Lord who like unto a lamb, died,
For our sins both great and small?
(for in Adam’s fall we sinned all).
But like the Dog, Fred (Pferd) the Horse
Carries the Knight steady upon his course:
For as anyone knows, Horses and Dogs
Are for the Gentleman indispensable:
They are our silent friends, they are as ’twere Logs
That register our sins tho uncountable
Trust not cats, but trust thou Horses and trust thou, Dogs
Edward G. Nilges 30 April 2013: copyright Edward G. Nilges (c) 2013: moral rights asserted
Change Record
1 May 2013 Added this record
1 May 2013 Line 4 grammar improved: “he” changed to “him”
This verdammte cancer may be growing and demanding food, whence my weight loss on which friends comment. It’s vascularized, deceiving my body into building blood vessels into it. This of course scares the living shit outa me but all I can do is Keep Calm, eat chocs (in bed) to gain weight and work with the doctors. A Freak Out is contra-indicated at this point.
When a bloke is in a grievous state, and is losing weight and is also HIV positive
Or he has good old cancer for which there’s no real answer after all these years except bunny piggy trials with strange drugs that him a buttock rash doth give
You could do worse than they did in the Blitz
And check into Claridge’s, or maybe the Ritz,
And say, I say,
Old Bean, it’s
(Interrupted suddenly by the whine of a German bomb followed by a most unholy BOOM)
Jolly frightening, this war of yours which you’d dearly love to make ours
And Lend Lease be damned,
And tho ’tis at Claridge’s we might have snagg’d a room,
Still there’s not enough whiskey sours
To cover up the fact that we are in quite a pickle,
Something that demands all of our might, main, moxie, and mickle,
And that confronts us as the Black Death and other miseries did afflict our ancestors
With the simple fact of mortality,
And that in the face of it, we build a fire, and sing Abide With Me,
With all of our friends and those of our relations
That haven’t disowned us completely as “black sheep” unworthy of their attenuated attentions.
For indeed, “we are all mortal”
And many English poems end with this thought as shall I, may God keep and protect my soul.
Edward G. Nilges 29 April 2013: copyright (c) Edward G. Nilges: moral rights asserted
When you have a Tumour
It’s best to cultivate a sense of humor:
Even if it’s coming out of your Head
And you think that you soon might be dead
Or it’s emerging from your bony Ass
You need to say, ils ne passeront pas!.
Let an “Edwardian” sonnet be one in which there may be zero, one or more extra terminating couplets
Song of Small Hope
The children’s future is a glass of love
Into which we peer with hope and dismay
Their innocent demands could destroy us
Until we pray, come what may, on this day.
On special occasions it’s a cup of hope
In Hell it’s a cough and a sob
As the smoker who’s at the end of his rope
Comes to understand that dying well’s a job.
And here I am after many a year. I am
Priam, and Troy’s a burning for real this time
As half crazed I wander not caring, that it’s Pri Iamb
For my metrical feet are burning in th’ grime.
Understand, please, that for me it’s serious
But if you don’t agree I shan’t be furious
You get a get out of jail free card from me
For you’re the Granny Mama, don’t you see.
Edward G. Nilges 11 April 2013. Copyright (c) 2013 by Edward G. Nilges. Moral Rights asserted.
Congee
Congee (good texture, solid and filling). Othello Act 2 as part of the Edward G. Nilges Grand High Shakespeare Reread. Here, Michael Cassio gets drunk on Iago’s incitement and is cashiered by Othello, making him and Roderigo both fools and victims of Iago. Iago, who has no need anymore for Roderigo, disposes of him at the end of the act.
An Ode Upon the Death of Baroness Thatcher, by Edward G. Nilges
In nineteen twenty five, her Mum hatched her
Baroness Mad Meg Thatcher
For her nation she was a disaster
But did that ever faze her?
Most historians do concur
That she was on the skids in eighty-two
Ready for the boot be given her
But soft…who are those soldiers who
March shambolic into Stanley
The cannon fodder of Galtieri
Who sends ‘em with a sneer
Whilst we all consult a gazetteer?
I say, old chap, where ARE these Falkland Islands, these Malvinas, these Malouines? Aha, here they are…good God old fellow…they are certainly remote lands, worth not the bones of a Pomeranian Grenadier, much less a British.
It was with a sneer the lady took shameless vantage
Of Galtieri’s stupidity
Many soldiers had to die
But psychopaths never count the damage.
Well, the rest was history
Victory
In the Falklands triggered a low dishonest decade.
I was there, wandering in the tawdry jingo shopping arcade
Britain had become.
The loud, the brassy and the shameless
Replaced the quiet voices in the pub
Of city clerks and miners, toffs and ordinary men.
They lost their jobs and their sons, no prospects in the North,
Came South to work at jobs they scarce understood
Spending their rage beating Spaniards in France.
And did those feet in ancient time?
In nineteen twenty five, her Mum hatched her
Baroness Mad Meg Thatcher
For her nation she was a disaster
But did that ever faze her?
Tawdry jingo she lived
Tawdry jingo she dies
Tawdry jingo she lies.
Copyright (C) 2013 by Edward G. Nilges
Good congee (not too watery): reading Hamlet: scene where Ghost first meets Hamlet saying “I am thy Father’s spirit”.
What About Them Bones on Epsom Heath?
I, that am rudely stamp’d, and want love’s majesty
To strut before a wanton ambling nymph;
I, that am curtail’d of this fair proportion,
Cheated of feature by dissembling nature,
Deformed, unfinish’d, sent before my time
Into this breathing world, scarce half made up,
And that so lamely and unfashionable
That dogs bark at me as I halt by them;
Shakespeare, Richard III: Illustration: photograph of Leicester bones now known with effective (six sigma) certainty to be those of Richard Plantagenet/Crook Back/Gloucester/III, King of England.
You so tall and fair proport
May waste in hospital ere long
And Death’s harbinger, sickness, may with you sport
That one with Richard is thy song:
O let me die or be a villain
I am rack’d upon these twisted bones,
And it’s for nowt my tears be spillin’
And so many are my groans.
Twisted am I and in pain
But groaning man did never gain.
Edward G. Nilges, screw it
You bear the burden of dreaming a smile under the sea
Protective of your sister. She’ll always be snuggling
As she learned to snuggle, in the amniotic sea.
