Rondeau Redouble-Under The Volcano

Just for fun (!) after a challenge at my local writing group I decided to write a type of rhyming poem known as a rondeau redouble- you can read about how to write one yourself here . I didn't realise there should be six stanzas, I thought you just repeated each line of the first stanza, so I only wrote five. I'll have to get round to doing a final one sometime!

The subject we chose was BEFORE and I didn't have any inspiration, until I was tidying out my book shelves and the libary angels pushed a copy of Under The Volcano by Malcolm Lowry onto my foot. I read it a long time ago when I was 18, far too young to understand it properly, I understood it intellectually in the boring way you have to when you study a text academically, I could see what all the symbols and metaphors meant blah blah blah. But I didn't get it.

This time when I read it it spoke to my heart and my soul and so I wrote this poem. As I don't normally write rhyming poetry I found it fiendishly difficult, the first thing I wrote came out like a bad country and western song. Hopefully this final version is better.

Under The Volcano
Rondeau Redoublé

I read this book before, too young to understand

the desire to kill the censor in your head.
I really want to stop him, save him from being damned.
It’s inevitable that he will end up dead.

Through alchemy and alcohol unconsciously he’s led
to the killing place the ancient gods have planned.
Pariah dogs and grinning skulls they all have to be fed.
I read this book before, too young to understand.

The letters left unopened, the love notes in her hand

he blots them out and drinks away the hateful things he said.
Haunted by things he didn’t do, and pulled by that demand,
the desire to kill the censor in your head.

He wakes up on the pavement, amazed at wounds so red,
I try to hold him upright but he slips away like sand.
And though he’s just a character, when he was cut I bled,
I really want to stop him, save him from being damned.

Horse with number seven, carnival skeleton band,
woman with a chicken, cockroach in the bed.
Mescal takes his mind away, unravelling each strand,
it’s inevitable that he will end up dead.

I read this book.

Squatting

I must say I was cheered up by this story. Pretty fair use of an MP's redundant 'so called home' I would say.

Warning! Women have breasts with nipples on them!

Today I finally got around to doing what I have been meaning to do for ages- change my homepage from the infantile and sexist Tiscali page to something else.

The last few days have featured the circle of shame showing women who have stretch marks, (men would get them too if they had given birth to 3 children), breasts with nipples on them (the horror, the horror!) and women who sometimes sweat when it is hot. Funnily enough men have breasts with nipples on them- they even flaunt them by going topless in summer, even though their nipples are entirely redundant; they also sweat. Men don't seem to be featured in the circle of shame. I wonder why that is?

Anyway I have had enough- as Tiscali is my service provider I had their home page by default and hoped that when they were acquired by Talk Talk that things might change. Sadly not. So I have changed home page and no longer will I be able to see the top Grand Prix pit babes, what a tragedy ;-)

I think the realisation of the stupidity of the whole nipple-shame thing was reinforced when reading my friend's experience of becoming a grandmother- you can read it here -in particular this extract.

Under the shelter of a white shawl, my daughter feeds Poppy on the harbourside. It’s their first walk out in the fresh air, their first outdoor feed. Again my part in things is to be there, to sit and wait. Faintly I hear the soft glug, glug and gasp of the baby taking in milk from her mother’s breast. Just as my daughter did from mine. Just as all the daughters did from all the mothers, going back and back and back through time. Mother and a daughter always, united in secret bliss, linked by an unbroken chain that stretches through vast aeons, back to when we were strange creatures with sharp faces hiding amongst the leaves of trees.

If women are going to be publicly castigated for having breasts with nipples on them, (something which is a natural part of our bodies,with a purpose) then I don't want to be a part of that world and I choose to cut it out of my life completely.

Revenge of Abraxas II

Watch out Coca Cola group, makers of the horrible Oasis drink, Abraxas II is coming to get you.

Oasis 'rubberduckzilla'

Blatant copying of Abraxas II I would say.