Green-eyed and red-haired, and worth every byte, here’s Ebba !
Author: Toastingfork
Not afraid to rhyme.
Death by Plot Device
Death by Plot Device
From Juliet to Cio-Cio-San,
By way of Emma Bovary –
They each were halted by a man
Who plots and spins their tragedy,
By ending them with his fatal pen –
All killed by their creator yet agen.
For Emmalene, no silver screen.
For Hannah Baker, life is shorter.
Ophelia is free to dream
With Bess, the landlord’s black-eyed daughter.
Giving up all they had to give,
Thus they must die so that a man may live.
Come Brünnhilde of the Norse,
Jocasta of the Greeks, come too,
And Thelma and Louise, of course –
Cecilia Lisbon’s joining you.
So young and clichéd, full of romance –
Farewell. Alas, you never had a chance.
For Anna Karenina and Hedda Gabler,
It will never be a wonderful life –
Each felt a fatalism grab her,
With a well-placed gun or foreshadowed knife.
Like all of the tragic women above
In their man-made sacrifices all for love.
Athelstan reads two poems
Winifrid reads two poems
Happy birthday, fivefold
Having completely failed to make my previous passing, I have decided to mark my half decade in style (is that a quintade ?, or is this the epitome of Unnecessary Latin ?)
Thanks to recent advancements in AI, it is now possible to create avatars of never-existed people in Midjourney, and voices of never-spoken tongues in Prime Voice, and then get the former to speak the latter thanks to D-ID. Although you won’t get to see that last part, as videos can only be included for premium WordPressers – after all they have to keep us riff-raff out…
And so, all this week I shall be unveiling my new Readers, who are definitely attempting to scale the slope out of uncanny valley and almost sorta kinda sound perfectly natural ! Well, as long as the poem doesn’t contain a question mark, as they can’t change their intonation. And as long as you don’t mind them sounding thoroughly middle class, as the British voice samples all tended towards the RP – which is a pity, as I always intended for my words to be read in an ‘Educated West Country’ accent.
However, saving the best for last, I have persuaded a couple of friends to read for me as well, and you can heartheir delightfully-human tones at the end of the week.
Sheep Music
Sheep Music
Camping by a field of sheep
That baa throughout the night –
The farmer says each ewe must peep
To check her lamb’s alright.
One wonders if they ever sleep,
Or keep a state of fright ?
But we are hypnotised by sweeping
Bleats by Luna light.
Until the dawn brings cheap-cheap-cheap
That sound too fresh and bright –
At least the sheep were slow and deep
As they camped besides the site.
Neptune’s Daughters
Neptune’s Daughters
As a kid, I used to believe in the Seven Seas –
But which on Earth were they ?
Clearly the Channel, the North, and the Irish,
But which were the other four ?, I’d say.
But then I learned there were dozens of others,
From the Med to Aegean to Adriatic –
Time for a rethink, I thought, to the map –
Clearly the rolling waves weren’t static !
Some people say they were numbered by the Arabs
From the Gulf to the South China Sea,
Others that they represent the oceans
In one big continuity.
But some say currents can separate them,
So some shall flood while others seep.
And others again say the seas are layers
From the sunlit shallows to Challenger Deep.
As a kid, I used to believe in the old salts’ notion,
Until I did no more –
And then I believed in the Panthalassic Ocean,
Lapping ev’ry shore.
And then I believed in gradients and upward swells
For the flows to surmount –
Yet the tides never asked their name as they rose and fell,
And the seas can’t count.
The Curious Case of Mr Smith
The Curious Case of Mr Smith
(in reply to Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Nile)
Agatha Christie cherished the Tories,
Kept the masses out of her stories –
Servants were faceless, background filler –
Never the victim, never the killer.
Whodunnits by nature are class-based, though,
With chaos disrupting the status quo,
That must be traced and rooted out
Before it spreads its dangerous doubt.
Now true, she distrusted businessmen,
And makes them villains agen and agen,
Not like a blue-blooded, honourable gent –
But was this an anti-Semitic bent ?
Of course, she hated the socialist –
But wait, with her there’s always a twist !
Just witness her Nile when splashed on the stage,
With Poirot banished back to the page –
Instead, a Canon is quizzing them,
While building his new Jerusalem –
One wonders what he might behold ?
A commune or sorts ? We’re not quite told.
And then, at last, there’s Mr Smith –
The snidy lefty they’re travelling with.
Part hypocrite, but only a part,
When a short-hand typist catches his heart.
He makes some good points along the way,
That it’s hard to imagine our Agatha say –
Perhaps once the cuts had been applied,
It left no room for a seedier side.
All-in-all, a little less sour,
Just as Attlee was coming to power.
For this one trip, it must be said,
It wasn’t only her herrings were red.
Synapse Error
Synapse Error
All my school-mates, all my former colleagues –
All now broken links.
When clicking on their memories,
I find each name and face un-syncs.
I’ve left a trail of 404s behind me,
An archive of data decay –
I’ve got no backup with which to remind me,
As all my friendships leak away.
Across the Multi-Verse
Across the Multi-Verse
Plenty of poets who only learned English later
Have plenty of English to tell,
Which makes all their poems so very much greater –
When using their step-mother tongue so well.
But usu’lly, they’re only in free verse, it must be said,
Not often in rhyme –
(Unless they are writing in pop instead,
Cos that happens all the time !)
Rhyming Couplets 