28 Aug 2013: “When LOVE, at portal to an Other’s fair”

When LOVE, at portal to an Other’s fair
Perceives something awry, it doesn’t rush in
To where an Angel with bright bedabbl’d hair
Holds up the gleaming sword of hell and sin
“This other’s bright fair may not be for you”
“If in dull seize you crush its life and truth”
“And leaving you both chain’d in wilds of Zoo”
“And naught but regret and verifiable ruth”
“Which poor Fool you didn’t advantage”
“Now that nobody’s vouch’d your truth”
“Leaving you prey solitary to fear and rage”
“Like a loser, like Oswald, or like Edwin Booth.”
Yes: Love, when made wise through life’s hard annoy,
Stops you at the doorsmile lest your joy it destroy.

Edward G. Nilges 28 Aug 2013: copyright 2013 by Edward G. Nilges: moral rights asserted

One Year of Life, A Sonnet in Thanksgiving

One year of Life with all its strain and strife
Is like a precious jewel in Godzilla’s eye
Especially when you have no known wife
To comfort you and make you Pie.
Instead I have troops of trusty friends
Unexpected, I thought my dotage would
Be like Macbeth who had the bends
When to Dunsinane came Birnam wood.
It’s raining chocolate and it’s raining buns
Upon my carcase tho I deserve it not:
And my son in turn he has little ones
Who are sprouting from puking Babe to mewling Tot.

For thou didst not leave his soul in Hell
Instead he’s in Grantham and all is Swell.

11 April 2014: Song

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.

Sonnet Writ in Trivial Pain at Easter, With Ka Yan Admonishing

Sonnet Writ in Trivial Pain at Easter

After great Pain, a formal Feeling comes – Emily Dickinson

He moans and groans at merest scars and slights
Who never felt the wound of love for real
Uncomprehending he, doth read of wights
Of old, when suffering meant verily “to feel”.
He whose Cross was redounded to our gain
Did suffer birth and joy at life’s own table
As also in Gesthamen garden pain
Himself to turn from the Cross unable…
For ’twas then that men, and women too
Had to endure so much more than us
Had to suck it up more than we do
And could not kick up much if any fuss.
But He did not like it any more than we:
Golgotha is Golgotha in any old key.

Chris Ayres is a British journalist who’s becoming a good writer for he learns as I do, from Folly. In War Reporting for Cowards Ayres describes his terror during a mercifully brief tenure as a war correspondent in Iraq with an honesty and modesty worthy of Harry Flashman.

In Death by Leisure, Ayres continues the saga into the 2005 boom and Los Angeles where he spent money he did not have. In a moment of clarity he remembers that his grandfather, a British soldier in a Polish POW camp for most of the War, came home only to be tossed in a tuberculosis ward for back then TB was a dread disease.

In Britain’s rationing you received as a single, older man like me one tinned slice of Spam per week. It was the size of a cell phone. Cigarettes were relatively cheap and they quelled hunger pangs (as they did for me when I was a student in the 1960s) by making you a little sick all the time.

But I insist on being able to run five miles at the age of 62 when in Britain of Ayres’ grandfather’s time, older men did not run save for the Clapham Omnibus, and, when they did run to catch the latter, they wheezed for fifteen minutes.

I cannot run owing to a back injury and this would make me impossible to live with as I moan and groan. But drawing and writing poetry alleviates this pain.

Our fathers and grandfathers did intend we should live more comfortable lives, for to paraphrase myself, they did die in April that we could live in May. And running has been very good to me. I am swimming only this week for I live near two beaches as a most fortunate man who has little money but some of the luck of the Irish.

Edward G. Nilges, “Ka Yan is young and her patronym is unknown! But even when she merely teaches maths and English, KaYan graciously admonishes, wise beyond wise!”, pencil on prelined notebook paper 9 April 2012.

All I know at this point about this drawing which came to me on the ferry is that when I drew it my back pain went completely away.

Pillar of Salt

Your silence speaks to me like the wind,
Or echoes in a deserted old hotel,
Are there those footsteps on the carpet again,
What storm flies before the salt sea smell?
The silence in front of the television set
My needs unmet and yours as well
What was this life save a fool’s errand and bet
In which I never knew the bad or good, its smell.
An open door in Kafka is now about to close
I gesture and I do not speak but no
Sound was heard as the wind arose
Your white hair hid your face as it did blow.
Shall I step over the low? Shall I go?
Forget you not is not a flower, this is all I know.

Edward G. Nilges 3 April 2011

Immortality, another Sonnet

I met a man who said these words to me
About “immortality”: it is not what
You would expect, and it is not, you see,
A thing that starts here or there like that.
How many times could you seriously endure
A single marriage in all its complexity
What children become, the pain that is pure
The uncertain hours of waiting, perplexity?
What you say you want is a trick of memory;
Von Neumann said off the top of his head,
The brain forgets nothing in its treasury
The brain retains the bread and pain for the dead.
And then we go on, carrying this weight
Up the side of the mountain. We love what we hate.

Lear

Remove the master from the master ring
Remove the Mister from his place at home
What’s left is mysterious misery…a bone
For boys to gnaw upon, fierce, and circling.
Don’t throw the baby out with the water
Don’t purge history of the father’s rage
Lear, the guy with only one real daughter
Was the old storm on Saturn in his old age.
The great red spot, the angry dot,
That has not ceased for centuries,
Has oases of the greatest calm, blue and kind
The green flash, the eye of the storm’s furies.
Learn what I know, to expect no quarter
That way she you’ll be glad to know. Oh my daughter.

Complaint of the Unknown Traditional Poet

They take their liberties, those people free
Of shame who laugh at rules, who eat my wine
And drink my cheese. Their grace offends.
If it is easy it is sleazy…not fine.
I follow the rules, and some fine day soon
I will be apotheosized, and rais’d above
The common herd which now tramples me
Crown’d will I be with laurel I will have their love.
It is me and not they the first born son
I am singular but they are plural
I am the bald Soprano…the chosen one
I shall be on some sort of mural.
But now I am forc’d to run with the bulls
Lest I be trampled in these dessicate hills.

The Apotheosis of the Limerick, that Wanted to be a Sonnet

There was a Limerick that wanted to be a Sonnet
But the other limericks thought it was off its bonnet
But it said,
‘Fore I’m dead,
I shall be a limerick that was knighted a sonnet!
Like a pawn on a chessboard did the brave poem advance
The others all cried, you don’t have a chance
But the brave little poem said fish fiddle dee dee
A lemonade sonnet I aspire to be
That cheeky limerick did ever advance!
Four lines were left, they were all a gog
You need five lines, you damn’d silly dog
But it said, no I don’t, watch this, silly cunt
And end I with a couplet…see if I won’t!

John Lennard (The Poet’s Handbook) “until the seventeenth century, any short lyric poem; thereafter supposedly and conventionally a poem of 14 lines in iambic pentameter but variants ranging from 10.5 – 20 lines are recognized.”

Other People Are Not Phenomena (a Sonnet)

“She’s got everything she needs, she’s an artist, she don’t look back” (Dylan)

O Noodle Guy, you emailed me a cup
Of Ramen which I won’t refuse today!
The artist she who climbs. Who works up
Not down, the brutish facts to thus array.
Jane Fonda dances at the Hilton in Hanoi
I’ll still so write if my computer is toast
I can live so trivial with no more joy
Without honor, a friendish Facebook host.
We probe the limits of our prisons
Using a plastic fork from the dining hall
We come up with a tentative description
In the darkness feeling your noumenal wall.
Today the news is not good, it’s of your rage
But, ’tis obvious: you’re going through a stage.

Edward G. Nilges 23 May 2010 Moral Rights asserted, so there.