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[Harry]

[The Conquistador]

Okay,I'm a bitch who just can't stand certain dialects.I'm not narrow,I can't help what grates on me.
What is the proper term for the seesawing type voice,I don't think it's an accent,people do it for effect and then it becomes contagious! I've caught myself doing it on occasion but afterwards I mimic myself with added enthasis and laugh it off. I blame "Friends".
Scots is defunct,ahh Rabbie Burns turn in your grave.

[Harry]

[The Conquistador]

I'm no fae glasga!

I know what you mean Harry but some of it is so archaic,sure use it as a craft skill kinda thing, but it doesn't to relate to a wider audience.And it seems pretenious.I do understand the importance of respecting language and being outraged so much is dying,it's awful.
Then AGAIN what harm does it do and... yes brilliant,If something bores me I'm just going to try and justify why.I can't,so onward tae aw tha hingies,aye uh ya.

[imaginarylove]

I must say, I cringe a little when I see Scots, but more important is the fact that whenever I make the effort to read it, I'm usually not impressed by the material.

Tennyson wrote some great poets in the Lincolnshire dialect and William Barnes in the Dorset dialect, but generally it's a matter of poet surpassing the self-imposed limitations of dialect.

[imaginarylove]

Time for some Skeltonics (which. amusingly, remind me of Subterranean Homesick Blues and vice-versa):


How the Doughty Duke of Albany like a Coward Knight ran away shamefully with an Hundred Thousand Tratling Scots and Fainthearted Frenchmen, beside the Water of Tweed

(An extract from)

by John Skelton


O ye wretched Scots,
Ye puant pisspots,
It shall be your lots
To be knit up with knots
Of halters and ropes
About your traitors’ throats.
O Scots perjured,
Unhaply ured,
Ye may be assured
Your falsehood discured
It is and shall be, from the Scottish sea
Unto Gabione,
For ye be false each one,
False and false again
Never true nor plain,
But fleery, flatter and feign,
And ever to remain
In wretched beggary
And maungy misery,
In lousy loathsomeness
And scabbed scorfiness,
And in abomination
Of all manner of nation,
Nation moost in hate,
Proud and poor of state:
Twit, Scot, go keep thy den,
Mell not with English men.
Thou did nothing but bark
At the castell of Warke:
Twit, Scot, yet again once.
We shall break thy bones
And hang you upon poles
And burn you all to coals,
With twit, Scot, twit, Scot, twit.
Walk, Scot, go beg a bit
Of bread, at ilke man’s heck.
The fiend, Scot, break thy neck.
Twit, Scot, again I say,
Twit, Scot of Galloway,
Twit, Scot, shake thee, dog, hey!
Twit, Scot, thou ran away.


We set not a fly
By your Duke of Albany.
We set not a prane
By such a drunken drane,
We set not a mite
By such a coward knight,
Such a proud palliard,
Such a skirgalliard,
Such a stark coward,
Such a proud poltroon,
Such a foul coistrown,
Such a doughty dagswain.
Send him to France again
To bring with him more brain
From King Francis of France.
God end them both mischance.
Ye Scots all the rabble,
Ye shall never be able
With us for to compare,
What though ye stamp and stare.
God send you sorrow and care.
With us whenever ye mell
Yet we bear away the bell,
When ye cankered knaves
Must creep in to your caves
Your heads for to hide,
For you dare not abide,
Sir Duke of Albany,
Right inconveniently
Ye rage and ye rave
And your worship deprave.
Not like Duke Hamilcar,
With the Romayns that made war,
Nor like his son Hannibal,
Nor like Duke Hasdrubal
Of Carthage in Alfike.
Yet somewhat ye be like
In some of their conditions
And their false seditions
And their dealing double
And their wayward trouble:
But yet they were bold
And manly manifold
Their enemies to assail
In plain field and battail.
But ye and your hoost
Full of brag and boost
And full of waste wind,
How ye will bears bind,
And the devil down ding,
Yet ye dare do nothing
But leap away like frogs
And hide you under logs
Like pigs and like hogs.
What an army were ye?
Or what activity
Is in you beggars, brawls,
Full of scabs and scalls:
Of vermin and of lice
And of all manner vice?

[Harry]

[Fairyboy69]

[Alfie Casanova]

A baby sardine
Saw her first submarine
And was scared when she looked through the peep hole
"Oh come, come, come"
Said the sardine's mum
"It's only a tin full of people"

Spike Milligan

I don't care what people* say, that is a fine effort.

* "Experts"

[Harry]

[imaginarylove]

[taciturnfriend]

Two poems by Richard Zola, who sadly died on Saturday. He was probably better known online and in certain London poetic corners than anywhere else. I'm not sure what you'll make of these, but here they are. Murmur, do these work for you? There's some similarity with surrealist poetry, I think, in the use of montage and vignette.


...well they nod their heads when air moves...

carry a table from your room to where the croci are
show them how the table is constructed
the circles made by cups

show them the wasps head you found near a windmill
that day looking closely

tell them how you heard the sound of bones in colliding grasses
how you he cried when you touched the baltic sea
how you saw danger in fourteen folded paper birds

show them your tongue
teeth
the soles of your feet
explain your misery

be naked for the croci

describe how the road that leads to the harbour
fills with voices according to the tide

describe a sickle




...premature requiem 11...

he reads she watches
he leans forwards back
the weave of a grass mat lightens darkens

she knows his skin
teeth
tongue
knows how he bows his head in quickly moving air

she’s seen him place a crucifix on the bed of a stream
she’s seen him running through insects
seen him pray for those who died in his mouth
she knows his history
the words he wrote on the underside of a cafe table

she’s seen him with another in the half light
of a sloping room

one august she murdered him with iron
wrapped his entrails around a tree
paddled his body like a boat beneath a blue bridge
candles in his hands a bell ringing as water rose fell

yesterday she told him:

as you’ve got older your hair has developed in different ways
straighter some still curling
grey strands barely identifiable as hair

your thin body that hair
you look like a newborn bird fallen from a nest
dead beneath a tree or fallen from a roof dead on asphalt

he closes the book
she watches him heat coffee
disappear into light through glass



"When I was about six, I was asked by a teacher to read my favourite poem in front of the class. At the time, in newspapers and magazines, there was a monochrome drawing of a tin of cat food and two contented cats. And there was an accompanying rhyme that went something like: "Kit - E - Kat is good for cats/ it keeps them young and fit/ and it's true I'm telling you/ your cat will really love it". There were two more verses and I recited them all. I loved it (the rhyme - I never tried the food). I was sent home with a note to my parents complaining about their son's attempt to subvert an English lesson." - Richard Zola

[unremarkable]

[taciturnfriend]

[taciturnfriend]

Musee des Beaux Arts
W.H. Auden



About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.
In Brueghel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.




The painting in question