RetroLounge
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Tue Sep-23-08 06:31 AM
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The RetroLounge Daily Poem Thread (Tue 9/23/2008) |
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Despond: A Slough
I am a prodigy of despair. In the womb I wailed the maternal night away, gurgling like a monkfish under water. My Francophile parents nicknamed me "Triste," although my schoolmates called me "Killjoy." At age ten I wrote a book of epigrams titled Despond: A Slough. Sample: "Time teaches us that happiness is nothing more than an early phase of sorrow." During puberty my clothes were covered in grass stains from the hours I spent writhing in torment en plein air. From that angle my father's lawn mower made a grimace of "existential nausea," a cliché I knew could never replicate the immanent sadness of inanimate objects. In college I played the saxophone because it had so many sad tone holes over which my numb fingers glumly riffed Coltrane's "I Want to Talk about You." I always stopped in the middle of the cadenza because I never wanted to talk about you. Was there a "you" anyway? Or were you always dead air? I see your deep ungulate eyes filling with tears as you ask me over and over, in a hundred bars and cafés and museum galleries, "Are you happy? Are you happy?" Enough already! I'm happy as a blue juniper berry plucked from an ancient juniper bush that gets passed from hand to filthy hand only to end up in a sentimental drunk's sloshing martini glass. Didn't you ever think the point of life was to become the purest distillate of dolor, to flee the psychiatrist's office in tears and fling the free sample packs of serotonin re-uptake inhibitors down the nearest storm drain? I thought not. Adieu, adieu, happy one, already moving on to happier lovers and lower-maintenance minds in uncluttered apartments where the only thing blue is the blue Bauhaus sofa with the basset hound dozing on top.
David Woo
********************
:hi:
RL
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lizziegrace
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Tue Sep-23-08 08:02 AM
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depressing.
I guess he's not a "glass half full" kind of guy... ;)
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RetroLounge
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Tue Sep-23-08 05:20 PM
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lizziegrace
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Tue Sep-23-08 05:21 PM
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BarenakedLady
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Tue Sep-23-08 08:12 AM
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I can relate. Some of us don't know how to "do" happy.
:shrug:
Seems like he's sort of making fun of himself. I laugh at my moroseness on occasion.
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RetroLounge
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Tue Sep-23-08 05:56 PM
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8. "I laugh at my moroseness on occasion." |
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Edited on Tue Sep-23-08 05:56 PM by RetroLounge
Yeah, I do that too... (laugh at mine that is)
:hi:
RL
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YankeyMCC
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Tue Sep-23-08 08:38 AM
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goes into my poem's file, thx! nt
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CaliforniaPeggy
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Tue Sep-23-08 10:52 AM
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Yikes!
That's scary and sad...
But wow, the use of language!
Really creative and beautiful...
Thank you!
:hi:
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Chorophyll
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Tue Sep-23-08 11:04 AM
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5. The poetic equivalent of that killjoy character Rachel Dratch plays on SNL. |
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And the music goes waa waa waa waaaaa...
I'm glad I don't know this guy.
:hi:
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miss_american_pie
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Tue Sep-23-08 06:11 PM
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9. I don't like that poem. |
RetroLounge
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Tue Sep-23-08 06:30 PM
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Tue Apr 23rd 2024, 05:30 AM
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