Golden Pager

 

A Nocturnal upon St. Lucy's Day

'Tis the year's midnight, and it is the day's, 

Lucy's, who scarce seven hours herself unmasks; 

         The sun is spent, and now his flasks 

         Send forth light squibs, no constant rays; 

                The world's whole sap is sunk; 

The general balm th' hydroptic earth hath drunk, 

Whither, as to the bed's feet, life is shrunk, 

Dead and interr'd; yet all these seem to laugh, 

Compar'd with me, who am their epitaph. 

Study me then, you who shall lovers be 

At the next world, that is, at the next spring; 

         For I am every dead thing, 

         In whom Love wrought new alchemy. 

                For his art did express 

A quintessence even from nothingness, 

From dull privations, and lean emptiness; 

He ruin'd me, and I am re-begot 

Of absence, darkness, death: things which are not. 

All others, from all things, draw all that's good, 

Life, soul, form, spirit, whence they being have; 

         I, by Love's limbec, am the grave 

         Of all that's nothing. Oft a flood 

                Have we two wept, and so 

Drown'd the whole world, us two; oft did we grow 

To be two chaoses, when we did show 

Care to aught else; and often absences 

Withdrew our souls, and made us carcasses. 

But I am by her death (which word wrongs her) 

Of the first nothing the elixir grown; 

         Were I a man, that I were one 

         I needs must know; I should prefer, 

                If I were any beast, 

Some ends, some means; yea plants, yea stones detest, 

And love; all, all some properties invest; 

If I an ordinary nothing were, 

As shadow, a light and body must be here. 

But I am none; nor will my sun renew. 

You lovers, for whose sake the lesser sun 

         At this time to the Goat is run 

         To fetch new lust, and give it you, 

                Enjoy your summer all; 

Since she enjoys her long night's festival, 

Let me prepare towards her, and let me call 

This hour her vigil, and her eve, since this 

Both the year's, and the day's deep midnight is.

John Donne

The Placid Pug - Lord Alfred Bruce Douglas

    The placid Pug that paces in the Park,

                Harnessed in silk and led by leathern lead,

Lives his dull life, and recks not of the Shark

In distant waters. Lapped in sloth and greed,

He fails in strenuous life to make a mark,

The placid Pug that paces in the park.

Round the slow circle of his nights and days

His life revolves in calm monotony.

Not unsusceptible to casual praise,

And mildly moved by the approach of "tea,"

No forked and jagged lightning leaps and plays

Round the slow circle of his nights and days.

He scarcely turns his round protuberant eyes,

To mark the mood of animals or men.

His joy is limited to mild surmise

When a new biscuit swims into his ken.

And when athwart his gaze a Rabbit flies,

He scarcely turns his round protuberant eyes.

And all the while the Shark in Southern seas

Pursues the paths of his pulsating quest,

Though the thermometer at fierce degrees

Might well admonish him to take a rest,

The Pug at home snores in ignoble ease.

(And all the while the Shark in Southern seas!)

If Pugs like Sharks were brought up in the sea

And forced to swim long miles to find their food,

Tutored to front the Hake's hostility,

And beard the Lobster in his dangerous mood,

Would not their lives more sane, more useful be,

If Pugs like Sharks were brought up in the sea?

The placid Pug still paces in the park,

Untouched by thoughts of all that might have been.

Undreaming that he might have "steered his bark"

Through many a stirring sight and stormy scene.

But being born a Pug and not a Shark

The placid Pug still paces in the park.

www.bombabomba.com

  There were people who escaped Hiroshima and rushed to Nagasaki to see that their loved ones were safe. Arriving just in time to be incinerated. He went there after the war with a team of scientists. My father. He said that everything was rusty. Everything looked covered with rust. There were burnt-out shells of trolleycars standing in the streets. The glass melted out of the sashes and pooled on the bricks. Seated on the blackened springs the charred skeletons of the passengers with their clothes and hair gone and their bones hung with blackened strips of flesh. Their eyes boiled from their sockets. Lips and noses burned away. Sitting in their seats laughing. The living walked about but there was no place to go. They waded by the thousands into the river and died there. They were like insects in that no one direction was preferable to another. Burning people crawled among the corpses like some horror in a vast crematorium. They simply thought that the world had ended. It hardly even occurred to them that it had anything to do with the war. They carried their skin bundled up in their arms before them like wash that it not drag in the rubble and ash and they passed one another mindlessly on their mindless journeyings over the smoking afterground, the sighted no better served than the blind. The news of all this did not even leave the city for two days. Those who survived would often remember these horrors with a certain aesthetic to them. In that mycoidal phantom blooming in the dawn like an evil lotus and in the melting of solids not heretofore known to do so stood a truth that would silence poetry a thousand years. Like an immense bladder, they would say. Like some sea thing. Wobbling slightly on the near horizon. Then the unspeakable noise. They saw birds in the dawn sky ignite and explode soundlessly and fall in long arcs earthward like burning party favors.

 

The Passenger - Cormac McCarthy

oVERhEATED

 

Of The Awefull Battle Of The Pekes And The Pollicles

TOGETHER WITH SOME ACCOUNT OF THE PARTICIPATION
OF THE PUGS AND THE POMS, AND THE INTERVENTION OF THE GREAT RUMPUSCAT

The Pekes and the Pollicles, everyone knows,
Are proud and implacable passionate foes;
It is always the same, wherever one goes.
And the Pugs and the Poms, although most people say
That they do not like fighting, will often display
Every symptom of wanting to join in the fray.
And they
                Bark bark bark bark
                Bark bark BARK BARK
        Until you can hear them all over the Park.

Now on the occasion of which I shall speak
Almost nothing had happened for nearly a week
(And that's a long time for a Pol or a Peke).
The big Police Dog was away from his beat -
I don't know the reason, but most people think
He'd slipped into the Bricklayer's Arms for a drink -
And no one at all was about on the street
When a Peke and a Pollicle happened to meet.
They did not advance, or exactly retreat,
But they glared at each other and scraped their hind feet,
And started to
                Bark bark bark bark
                Bark bark BARK BARK
        Until you could hear them all over the Park.

Now the Peke, although people may say what they please,
Is no British Dog, but a Heathen Chinese.
And so all the Pekes, when they heard the uproar,
Some came to the window, some came to the door;
There were surely a doyen, more likely a score.
And together they started to grumble and wheeye
In their huffery-snuffery Heathen Chinese.
But a terrible din is what Pollicles like,
for your Pollicle Dog is a dour Yorkshire tyke,
And his braw Scottish cousins are snappers and biters,
And every dog-jack of them notable fighters;
And so they stepped out, with their pipers in order,
Playing When the Blue Bonnets Came Over the Border.
Then the Pugs and the Poms held no longer aloof,
But some from the balcony, some from the roof,
Joined in
To the din
With a
                Bark bark bark bark
                Bark bark BARK BARK
        Until you could hear them all over the Park.

Now when these bold heroes together assembled,
The traffic all stopped, and the Underground trembled,
And some of the neighbours were so much afraid
That they started to ring up the Fire Brigade.
When suddenly, up from a small basement flat,
Why who should stalk out but the GREAT RUMPUSCAT.
His eyes were like fireballs fearfully blazing,
He gave a great yawn, and his jaws were amazing;
And when he looked out through the bars of the area,
You never saw anything fiercer or hairier.
And what with the glare of his eyes and his yawning,
The Pekes and the Pollicles quickly took warning.
He looked at the sky and he gave a great leap -
And they every last one of them scattered like sheep.

And when the Police Dog returned to his beat,
There wasn't a single one left in the street.

Operation: Doomsday