no zip code no mail, I have wrist watches I wear them....these are only "obsolete" to people who live in a narrow world and inside their box......sad little zombies
I think that I shall never see a fuck ungiven by a tree with pollen released prolifically, as if by pontiffs pointedly presuming to bless trees everywhere, receptive or not, without a care.
This poem seems to be a play on the famous poem "The Road Not Taken" by Robert Frost. It uses a similar structure and rhyme scheme, but instead of discussing the choices one makes in life, it uses the metaphor of a tree giving or not giving a "fuck" to comment on the idea of giving or withholding care or attention. The use of religious imagery with the use of "pontiffs" adds an interesting layer to the poem. The poem seems to be a commentary on the idea of apathy and the consequences of not giving a "fuck" about things. Overall, it's a clever and witty poem that pokes fun at the traditional structure of poetry and adds a fresh perspective on a familiar theme.
I assumed a zip code was the US version of a postcode - we still have those here.
Haven't worn a wristwatch for a year or so - decided the battery was not worth the expense. Then again, I've never been much of a timekeeper. Life's to short to measure it.
Optical discs? Still have them. My hi-fi stereo is fully functional. Even have an old VHS player upstairs, and there are a few, log unplayed tapes hanging around. And I have a box full of floppy discs and a usb drive for them, to mention something not on the list.
As to an inkwell - I have a wooden construction that has 4 inkwells above a drawer for the pens and nibs which I made myself. If I remember, I'll take a photo. I have been known to write with a quill on occasions...
Yes, the little blighter residing next door is particularly barky, even engaging in rage if it sees us through one of the windows in our own house. I relish the thought of sitting in a chair with a book by the pumpkin patch until it barks itself hoarse.
When I read a beautiful poem or comment I do my best still to write it into a my special book in cursive. I note it has become more wobbly as time has gone on 😀 @Katherine Bond
Ah, a desk with an inkwell into which some boy would dip some girl's pigtail should she be sitting at a desk right in front of him. Not for smaller kids, who would have a slate instead...and chalk.
At the end of the day they'd be wiped clean by one of those infamous oily rags kept in a can for that purpose. So any time you see a vintage message on how to prevent fires and warn about spontaneous combustion of oily rags, well, think outside the garage. 😀
blackboard waiting at the edge of night, show these broken kids how not to see all those lies... you were only waiting for their minds to be become free... blackboard smiles... blackboard smiles... It was only waiting for this moment of release...
This is a poem or song lyrics that appears to be describing a blackboard as a symbol of education and enlightenment. The blackboard is waiting at the edge of night, and it is suggested that it can show the children how not to be misled by lies. The blackboard is also described as smiling, which may symbolize its ability to bring joy and understanding to the children. The poem ends with the idea that the blackboard has been waiting for this moment of release, which could mean that it is finally able to fulfill its purpose of teaching and enlightening the children.
There is a beauty about the shadows on the snow. The sun shows all the different textures in snow. The snow is lightly falling here and I’ll be leaving to meet my crew for dinner. That should wake me up.
I just spent quality time hunting down that hamster joke I saw yesterday on Mastodon and it still eludes me...but I thought of you, Katherine, when I saw it. It goes something like this, not verbatim:
Friend: that space suit you put on your hamster isn't cute--it's ridiculous. Me: Don't diss Fuzz Aldrin.
The children on the lawn joined hand to hand go round and round
each arm going into the next arm, around full circle until it comes back into each of the single bodies again
They are singing, but not to each other: their feet move almost in time to the singing
We can see the concentration on their faces, their eyes fixed on the empty moving spaces just in front of them.
We might mistake this tranced moving for joy but there is no joy in it
We can see (arm in arm) as we watch them go round and round intent, almost studious (the grass underfoot ignored, the trees circling the lawn ignored, the lake ignored) that the whole point for them of going round and round is (faster slower) going round and round
ii
Being with you here, in this room
is like groping through a mirror whose glass has melted to the consistency of gelatin
You refuse to be (and I) an exact reflection, yet will not walk from the glass, be separate.
Anyway, it is right that they have put so many mirrors here (chipped, hung crooked) in this room with its high transom and empty wardrobe; even the back of the door has one.
There are people in the next room arguing, opening and closing drawers (the walls are thin)
You look past me, listening to them, perhaps, or watching your own reflection somewhere behind my head, over my shoulder
You shift, and the bed sags under us, losing its focus
there is someone in the next room
there is always
(your face remote, listening)
someone in the next room.
iii
However, in all their games there seems to be some reason
however abstract they at first appear
When we read them legends in the evening of monstrous battles, and secret betrayals in the forest and brutal deaths,
they scarcely listened; one yawned and fidgeted; another chewed the wooden handle of a hammer; the youngest one examined a slight cut on his toe,
and we wondered how they could remain completely without fear or even interest as the final sword slid through the dying hero.
The next night walking along the beach
we found the trenches they had been making: fortified with pointed sticks driven into the sides of their sand moats
and a lake-enclosed island with no bridges:
a last attempt (however eroded by the water in an hour) to make maybe, a refuge human and secure from the reach
of whatever walks along (sword hearted) these night beaches.
iv
Returning to the room: I notice how all your word- plays, calculated ploys of the body, the witticisms of touch, are now attempts to keep me at a certain distance and (at length) avoid admitting I am here
I watch you watching my face indifferently yet with the same taut curiosity with which you might regard a suddenly discovered part of your own body: a wart perhaps,
and I remember that you said in childhood you were a tracer of maps (not making but) moving a pen or a forefinger over the courses of the rivers, the different colours that mark the rise of mountains; a memorizer of names (to hold these places in their proper places)
So now you trace me like a country’s boundary or a strange new wrinkle in your own wellknown skin and I am fixed, stuck down on the outspread map of this room, of your mind’s continent (here and yet not here, like the wardrobe and the mirrors the voices through the wall your body ignored on the bed),
transfixed by your eyes’ cold blue thumbtacks
v
The children like the block of grey stone that was once a fort but now is a museum:
especially they like the guns and the armour brought from other times and countries and when they go home their drawings will be full for some days, of swords archaic sunburst maces broken spears and vivid red explosions.
While they explore the cannons (they aren’t our children)
we walk outside along the earthworks, noting how they are crumbling under the unceasing attacks of feet and flower roots;
The weapons that were once outside sharpening themselves on war are now indoors there, in the fortress, fragile in glass cases;
Why is it (I’m thinking of the careful moulding round the stonework archways) that in this time, such elaborate defences keep things that are no longer (much) worth defending?
vi
And you play the safe game the orphan game
the ragged winter game that says, I am alone
(hungry: I know you want me to play it also)
the game of the waif who stands at every picture window,
shivering, pinched nose pressed against the glass, the snow collecting on his neck, watching the happy families
(a game of envy)
Yet he despises them: they are so Victorian Christmas-card: the cheap paper shows under the pigments of their cheerful fire- places and satin- ribboned suburban laughter and they have their own forms of parlour games: father and mother playing father and mother
He’s glad to be left out by himself in the cold
(hugging himself).
When I tell you this, you say (with a smile fake as a tinsel icicle):
You do it too.
Which in some ways is a lie, but also I suppose is right, as usual:
although I tend to pose in other seasons outside other windows.
vii
Summer again; in the mirrors of this room the children wheel, singing the same song;
This casual bed scruffy as dry turf, the counterpane rumpled with small burrows, is their grassy lawn and these scuffed walls contain their circling trees, that low clogged sink their lake
(a wasp comes, drawn by the piece of sandwich left on the nearby beach (how carefully you do such details); one of the children flinches but won’t let go)
You make them turn and turn, according to the closed rules of your games, but there is no joy in it
and as we lie arm in arm, neither joined nor separate (your observations change me to a spineless woman in a cage of bones, obsolete fort pulled inside out), our lips moving almost in time to their singing,
listening to the opening and closing of the drawers in the next room
(of course there is always danger but where would you locate it)
(the children spin a round cage of glass from the warm air with their thread-thin insect voices)
and as we lie here, caught in the monotony of wandering from room to room, shifting the place of our defences,
I want to break these bones, your prisoning rhythms (winter, summer) all the glass cases,
erase all maps, crack the protecting eggshell of your turning singing children:
When I were a lad me dad worked 28 hours a day down t' factory and was flogged if he took time off for food, drink or toilet; he then walked 36 miles home to sleep for 10 minutes before 'avin to get up for his next shift. But we was grateful to the bosses, we was, in them days, even though we had nowt to eat but rotten spuds from up t' mountainside...
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