Sonnet - Metamorphosis
I am the victim of time’s violence.
This pressing sky, these over-sleekit roads
These blizzards of ebullience,
This rain, this fog that frequently forebodes
Much worse. All kept me from the barber’s chair
And let my hair presume to reach my brow.
My gliding form has lost its athlete’s flair,
And, seaweeded, retards the forehead’s prow
When cutting through the pool’s décolletage,
Requiring several towels to get it dry.
A Neptune slowed to Saturn’s gnarly age
My crawl-stroke wasted, power gone awry.
But could my new-born wastrel turbulence
Proclaim a poet’s mane of consequence?
NOTE: Not to be taken seriously. An attempt to break away from the 3½ quatrains that the sonnet form tends to impose. To me, habituated, it forms a different straitjacket.
UNAVOIDABLE Twentieth-century music! Twelve-tone shivers down the spines of those who drew up the drawbridge with Brahms. But the century includes Strauss, Elgar, Sibelius and Mahler. If you want to know how it all fits together (including jazz and pop) “The rest is noise” by Alex Ross, music critic of New Yorker, was enthusiastically reviewed in the UK and is brilliantly written – a must read. Your stepping stone to the Berg violin concerto, which, like Naples, you must experience before death. Or afterwards if there are suitable facilities.
DARWIN UPDATE BBC4 yesterday continued its wonderful series on hard science with, in effect, a lecture on the origins of chaos theory. Ah the mind of man. Ending with an unbelievable piece of software containing an algorithm which simulates evolution, a process which in real life takes millennia. An incompetent cartoon mannikin trips over then learns to walk with confidence and it’s the maths what done it.
This pressing sky, these over-sleekit roads
These blizzards of ebullience,
This rain, this fog that frequently forebodes
Much worse. All kept me from the barber’s chair
And let my hair presume to reach my brow.
My gliding form has lost its athlete’s flair,
And, seaweeded, retards the forehead’s prow
When cutting through the pool’s décolletage,
Requiring several towels to get it dry.
A Neptune slowed to Saturn’s gnarly age
My crawl-stroke wasted, power gone awry.
But could my new-born wastrel turbulence
Proclaim a poet’s mane of consequence?
NOTE: Not to be taken seriously. An attempt to break away from the 3½ quatrains that the sonnet form tends to impose. To me, habituated, it forms a different straitjacket.
UNAVOIDABLE Twentieth-century music! Twelve-tone shivers down the spines of those who drew up the drawbridge with Brahms. But the century includes Strauss, Elgar, Sibelius and Mahler. If you want to know how it all fits together (including jazz and pop) “The rest is noise” by Alex Ross, music critic of New Yorker, was enthusiastically reviewed in the UK and is brilliantly written – a must read. Your stepping stone to the Berg violin concerto, which, like Naples, you must experience before death. Or afterwards if there are suitable facilities.
DARWIN UPDATE BBC4 yesterday continued its wonderful series on hard science with, in effect, a lecture on the origins of chaos theory. Ah the mind of man. Ending with an unbelievable piece of software containing an algorithm which simulates evolution, a process which in real life takes millennia. An incompetent cartoon mannikin trips over then learns to walk with confidence and it’s the maths what done it.
Novel progress 20/1/10. Ch. 12: 1724 words. Chs. 1 - 11: 48,792 words. Comments: Unproductive day. Still on the M6.
