In Which There Is the Can-Can

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

April 29 2013: Keep Calm You Chaplings

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

14 April 2013: A Vulgar Poem

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!.

9 April 2013 Congee: Ode

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

Workout Log 14 Sep 2012: the Jelly Fish Speaks!

Prospect from Queen Mary Hospital 11 September 2012

Thirty minutes, as always, first thing: weight training to Journey to the Line, free dance to Glenn Gould’s Sweelinck, weights to Vangelis L’Enfant, freedance to Gabriel’s Oboe!

Beautiful fresh morning on the first ferry from Lamma to Central. I’ll tell you how the sun rose.

Forgot my bag o’ (legal) drugs and had to run back for them, race walked to the ferry so let us see if this causes extra leg pain, still trying to get back to running as it were the garden or something. Next step will be doing thirty minutes of the Badass Billy Blank workout that I was doing at the beginning of the year. But it shall also be important to hang in the water and do aerobic motion like a Portuguese Man of War or Jellyfish to assist in separating my bones.

A Jelly Fish
Said, it is my Wish
To remain boneless. I would really rather hate
To be a Vertebrate.

Ode to a Strange and Tropical Fruit

I have never (up to now) eaten, I have never seen
A fruit as strange as the Mangosteen:
The darkest purple with green testicles,
You only eat its vesicles…
That slightly obscene, but unarguably delicious,
Mangosteen.

They were in my room. I ate one rind and all and it was extraordinarily bitter. I then looked up “Mangosteen” in Wikipedia to learn that only the inner flesh is edible. Oh dear. But the other parts aren’t poisonous since I am not dead. My fellow guests were amused at the communal table to hear of my adventure for the Mangosteen is well known in Thailand.

But not in Hong Kong while its complement the Durian (the famous fruit that smells like a wet fart or rotting food when cut open) is very well known.

Because of the fact that circa 1960 American fruits became suddenly tasteless and toxic, I have long eaten far too few fruits and have unpleasant psychological associations with most fruits apart from bananas and now the Mangosteen. I have to eat more for my condition and hope to find the Mangosteen in Hong Kong.

Popeye Cometh Out of the Closet, an Original Balade

The Balade of Gay Popeye

I’m Popeye the sailor man
I no longer eat out of a can
Bluto prepares for me
A wonderful Spinach Fettucine
And we share a Chateau Lafitte
And under the table do meet
Our well manicured metrosexual feet
Oh it’s so much fun now to be so effete!
One of these days and I hope it is soon
A Homo child we’ll have developed by black arts on a secret place on the Moon
Confirming Mitt Romney’s fear,
That if enough of us turn queer,
God or the Devil with not with us make Remonstrancy,
But instead alter biology allowing that unspeakable Horror: male pregnancy!

it seems so long ago and yet just yesterday
Before either of us admitted we’re gay.
And we both lived on stinking boats
With stack gas and dead billy goats,
And fought over Miss Olive Oyl,
For her bony ass made our blood, to so boil.
But now she’s set up housekeeping
With Bettry Boop she is sleeping
And Bluto and I are so happy
He makes me feel all girly and slappy!
I am what I am and that’s what I am
I’m Popeye the Gay Sailor Man!! Toot Toot!!

Edward G. Nilges 20 August 2012. Copyright 2012 by Edward G. Nilges. Moral rights have been asserted, so don’t “get gay” with me, that is, don’t mess with my intleckshul property!.

Edward G Nilges

ODE on the Hong Kong Handover

China said hand it over
And without any bovver
Great Britain said courteously, why, certainly we shall!
And oh, by the way, pal,
Look how nice our rule of law is for one and for all
And freedom of trade, and religion,
And public ‘ouses which you can ‘ave a pint in.
China said, yeah, yeah, yeah,
Just steam away, HMS Britannia.

Copyright (c) 2012 by Edward G. Nilges. Moral rights asserted.

Sleepless in Sciatica

Some Amusing Poems Written During Lower Back and Leg Pain

A disobliging old Gentleman from Arabia
Said oh damn this painful Sciatica
The spongiform pressure on the blasted Nerve
Has drained me of my usual Vigor and Verve
Said that disagreeable old Gentleman from Arabia

Another gentleman from Attica
Said this tedious and persistent Sciatica
Has spread to my pubic Bone
Leaving me feeling rather alone
That desolate gentleman from Attica

A thick headed Dutchman from Pennsylvania
Said ach hier ist meine Sciatica
I shall go and dig a hole
And fill it with coal
To get my Mind off this verdammt Sciatica.

A fair lady of Alsace-Lorraine
Said, there is that wandering Pain
Sometimes in me foot and then in me Arse
Rendering me completely unable to parse
The prose of de Sade which many disdain!

Another Lady, an Incroyable of Paris
Said, I won’t bullshit you or put on Airs
But I have lost all interest in Fornication
Because the pain in my foot gives me consternation.
That unfortunate Lady of Paris!

THRENODY (Writ by MILTON)

Sing oh Muse, of the false Sciatic Nerve
Reporting false pain in the chambers of the leg,
Like unto the SIRENS which would ODYSSEUS deceive
With cries inchoate, cries of beings without souls,
Luring they would the Hero to a watery grave,
Or like Zeus when he took upon him the form of Bull
To rape EUROPA, island nymph fair of form and feature,
Rewarding she with the high and regal throne of CRETE,
And like, also, a lot of other high and CLASSICAL tales
Which I pondered when young was I, the Lady of Christ’s,
A promising Scholar as yet unattainted
By Sin, Death, Hell and treason to my martyred Liege,
Charles, who lost his head. Where was I. O yes
My nuts sometimes throb and then me buttocks
But as soon as I change my wonted position
My Foot becomes my Tutor, and I must cease
Writing Paradise Lost, and attend to the Brutish animal
That we all are condemn’d to be by high command,
And take another swig of Wine that clouds judgement,
And call to my Daughters for another heated Pad
Plucked from the flickering and hissing Fire
Like a soul freed from that more Venial punition
Which redeems through dampened flames the weaker sort
Who in life did fall yet did repent.
My ass hurts and so doth my Ball, but I must bear all
For SCIATICA is but a consequence of Adam’s fall.

Rondeley for a Dirty Old Man

She was young and he was old
But what’s a cheese without a little mold?

Ah, elle une jolie jeune fille mais ils et vielle
Mais qu’est que ce Fromage sans mouler?

She was slender lithe supple and nubile
He was fat, with a herniated disk, and very vile

Elle et une Nymph, la Sylphe dans la champs
Ils et une Pantagruel with piss in his pants

She was a Gamin without a Sou to her name
He was a Banker with money and a complete lack of shame

Une Gamin c’etait Elle, de la Boulevard, Rue, et l’Impasse
Une Bourgeois he with plenty of cash

And so they were Wed and he took her to Bed
Where before you could say “Jack Robinson” he died, and was Dead

Alors enfin une Mariage et la Chambre d’Amour
Eh bien, on dit, “Pepe Le Moko” et ils sont Mourir

Whereupon she became a grand Inheritrix
And the toast of all Toms, all Harries, and Dicks

Elle est une Dame de la Societe, une Gratine
Et une Incroyable vivent la Rue Capuchine

This fable has no particular Moral
Save that the world over is buggered, overall

La Morale, Monsieur, n’existe partout
Saufe, personne dit, maudit est tout!

7 May 2012 by Edward G. Nilges, with apologies to the Academie Francais. Le Droit Morale s’asserte, mort de ma vie and sacred Blue.