If you could what would you write ...

[oneofus]

I love poetry and when I'm down or up, I can always drag something out match the mood.

I can't stand at a window in Summer without thinking of Keat's Ode to a Nightingale

Fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget What thou among the leaves hast never known, The weariness, the fever, and the fret Here, where men sit and hear each other groan; Where palsy shakes a few, sad, last gray hairs, Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies; Where but to think is to be full of sorrow And leaden-eyed despairs, Where Beauty cannot keep her lustrous eyes, Or new Love pine at them beyond to-morrow.

http://www.bartleby.com/126/40.html

I wonder often if he suffered depression. But if I want to be depressed and there are days then Auden's Funeral Blues hits the mark

Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,
Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,
Silence the pianos and with muffled drum
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.

Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead
Scribbling on the sky the message He is Dead.
Put crepe bows round the white necks of the public doves,
Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves.

He was my North, my South, my East and West,
My working week and my Sunday rest,
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;
I thought that love would last forever: I was wrong.

The stars are not wanted now; put out every one,
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun,
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the woods;
For nothing now can ever come to any good

[mick_uk]

I've always though this poem sums me up.


Stevie Smith - Not waving but drowning


Nobody heard him, the dead man, But still he lay moaning:
I was much further out than you thought and not waving but drowning.
Poor chap, he always loved larking and now he's dead.
It must have been too cold for him his heart gave way,They said.
Oh, no no no, it was too cold always(Still the dead one lay moaning)
I was much too far out all my life and not waving but drowning.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NC2b9...=youtube_gdata

[Veronica H]

Sometimes I feel like a priest in a fish and chip queue,
quietly thinking as the vinegar runs through,
how nice it would be to buy supper for two.

Roger McGough

[mick_uk]

I like that one Veronica, never heard it before

[Veronica H]

Hi Nick/Mick
This will be an interesting thread for us all, and I like both of your contributions.

Veronicax

[Veronica H]

Mother, any distance greater than a single span
requires a second pair of hands.
You come to help me measure windows, pelmets, doors,
the acres of the walls, the prairies of the floors.

You at the zero-end, me with the spool of tape, recording
length, reporting metres, centimetres back to base, then leaving
up the stairs, the line still feeding out, unreeling
years between us. Anchor. Kite.

I space-walk through the empty bedrooms, climb
the ladder to the loft, to breaking point, where something
has to give;
two floors below your fingertips still pinch
the last one-hundredth of an inch...I reach
towards a hatch that opens on an endless sky
to fall or fly.

Mother by Simon Armitage
Veronicax

[gypsywomen]

Climbing up a mountain,
Pulling yourself higher and
higher.
Out of the pit of misery.
Things seem to look brighter.
Grass is growing, Birds are
singing,
And the sun emerges from the
clouds.
Then you start to slip,
To lose your grasp,
And down you fall.
Not quite to the bottom,
Just teetering on a ledge,
Could you go over at any moment
Have you the strength to climb
again?
The pain of your cut soul
Burns like a fire,
The anger, hurt and frustration
Come flooding back into your
mind.
The fight for survival starts
again.
Overcome the fear,
Search for the holds,
Rely on the support from before.
I know it's going to be difficult,
But you did it once,
You can do it again.
Remember, you're not the only
one -
Out there are other climbers
Fighting their own battles,
Searching their own soul
And conquering their own
mountains.


. . . . . . . . . .by emma nurton

[mick_uk]

Said Hamlet to Ophelia,

I'll draw a sketch of thee,

What kind of pencil shall I use?

2B or not 2B?

[oneofus]

To all our members of the fairest sex

Shall I compare thee to a Summer's day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And Summer's lease hath all too short a date:
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And oft' is his gold complexion dimm'd;
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance or nature's changing course untrimm'd:
But thy eternal Summer shall not fade
Nor lose possession of that fair thou owest;
Nor shall Death brag thou wanderest in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou growest:

So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

[Veronica H]

I stole through the dungeons, while everyone slept,
Till I came to the cage where the monster was kept,
There, locked in the arms of a Giant Baboon,
Rigid and smiling, lay....Mrs Ravoon!

I climbed the clock-tower in the first morning sun
And 'twas midday at least ere my journey was done;
But the clock never sounded the last stroke of noon,
For there, from the clapper, swung Mrs Ravoon.

I hauled in the line, and I took my first look
At the half eaten horror that hung from the hook.
I had dragged from the depths of the limpid lagoon
The luminous body of Mrs Ravoon.

I fled in the storm, through lightning and thunder,
And there, as a flash split the darkness asunder,
Chewing a rat's-tail and mumbling a rune,
Mad in the moat squatted Mrs Ravoon.

I stood by the waters so green and so thick,
And I stirred at the scum with my old, withered stick;
When there rose through the ooze, like a monstrous balloon,
The bloated cadaver of Mrs Ravoon.

Facing the fens, I looked back from the shore
Where all had been empty a moment before;
And there, by the light of the Lincolnshire moon,
Immense on the marshes, stood Mrs Ravoon!

Alternative Endings To An Unwritten Ballad by Paul Dehn

Feel free to contribute your own alternative endings
Veronicax