Dang, it probably isn't ever going to get any lighter than this from me!
I have been fretting that there's been a little too much negativity spewing from my keyboard just lately, especially in the briefly proliferating 'Where in the world am I?' series, so I thought I'd counter with this - a frippery from amongst the earliest of my poetic endeavours. I'm not sure that I should even call it a poem, really; it's just a thing, a little piece of whimsy.
It was, of course, inspired by my classical training, by the realisation that one of the paradigmatic stories in world culture is The Quest, the young hero being sent off to 'prove himself' by doing something stupidly dangerous and far beyond the capability of regular mortals; and that, almost always, an element of the motivation for such foolhardy endeavour is to win the love of a beautiful maiden (though in those primitive, patriarchal times, she was rarely a rounded out character; more often a fairly anonymous component of the 'reward', along with the trunk full of gold pieces and the title to a minor, unimportant princedom). I thought I'd take the idea of trying to impress the knickers off a girl by making extravagant promises of heroic derring-do, and distil it to its simplest possible expression; something a little more realistic, a little more flip, more in keeping with modern times. And this is what I came up with.
First Attempt At A Love Poem
I would list 100 impossible things
Attempt several of the least dangerous
And maybe even succeed in a few
All and anything
To win one kiss from you
3 comments:
A friend's poem, Crimes of Lust, includes the line: "I'd jaywalk this empty street for you"-- which I always loved.
Hmmm, I might steal that for something I'm playing around with at the moment (working title: Empty Gestures).
Do you know Otis Lee Crenshaw, wildly un-PC ex-con Country rocker from Tennessee (in fact, a comic character created by the comedian, Rich Hall - it was voted best comedy act at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival a few years back)? I loved this line in one of his songs:
"The judge calls it stalking,
But it's just selective walking."
There's nothing categorically wrong about artistic theft in my book, but perhaps with this one I should disclose to you that the line has been published-- Greg Hewett's collection "Red Suburb." Let us know about Empty Gestures.
Don't know this Otis Lee, but I like the stalker line :)
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