AI

[dedalus]

愛

"Ai" is the Chinese/ Japanese character that represents Love.

Nam desunt vires ad me mihi iusque regendum;
auferor ut rapida concita puppis aqua.
Non est certa meos quae forma invitet amores --
centum sunt causae, cur ego semper amen.*

I love her
and she loves me
and I think
so what, like,
if our parents disagree.
Who gives a damn
I mean, you know,
it’s not as though
we’re little kids
or something.

As I roved out on a bright May morning
to view the meadows and flowers gay …

Sliding down the slippery slick
corridors, screeching to a halt
in the shh…shh… shush shush library:
well then where the hell is she?
She gave me her name last night,
not quite her telephone number,
and she said she might be here.
Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy
whiles away the passing minutes
but I’m not so sure this Burton boy
understood real agony: Kraww!
I crack my leg, painfully, on the table
as she walks in, smiling,
walks in smiling with some other bloke.
Hi, she grins, this is my boyfriend Pym
Pym plays on the college football team.
Howya doing, mate? (Grrr …Pym, PYM?)
Shake hands … a dry prehensile claw.
Poor Pym needs help with Civil Law
and I thought, you being so intelligent?

Whom should I spy but my own true lover
as she sat under yon willow tree?

Crouched in the shabby hotel lobby
she says she respects my noble heart
but draws away when I try to kiss her.
No, no, she says, you play your part,
and me (she sighs) I must play mine.
My darling, I say, you look divine.
Stop that. Mister, you and me get married
tomorrow down in Bethnal Green; of a sudden keen
she cries, jew memba hotcha say?
Yes, I remember what to say.
My uncle, you know, when I get the passport,
he pay you, like, five hunnert pound, I swear.
Yeah, right .. but the money is neither here nor there.
It’s not the passport, girl, it’s the way I feel!
She pats my hand, a deal is a deal.

I took off my hat and I did salute her
I did salute her most courageously ...

Blonde haired blue eyed Alison
fit to a T my hippy ideal:
embroidered dresses, careless tresses,
a Burne-Jones figure, ethereal.
Sad that the life of her mind
had been somehow somewhere left behind
when the one thing that you cannot do
is make panting love forever.
You need to come up at times for air,
for food, for drink, for the toilet, whatever,
and then to show how much you care
you embark on friendly talk.
Poor dear Alison.
Mmmm.
I recall another Princess of our Hearts …
begin to feel for poor old Charley.

When she turned around, the tears fell from her,
saying “False young man, you have deluded me.”

Our country is like a woman
says small intense Wei Ming Zhang
and we have been r-r-raped so many times!
She flashes her eyes, she licks her lips,
she glares at me with intense hatred
and I think, O jolly good, yes, rather!
Later, in the hotel restaurant
over the Happy People finger food
and the fiery Great Country cocktails
she initiates a hesitant courtship:
You professor, ha? You, how much money?
Well, haha, I do all right.
You got money, no got money, what?
I adore your charming frown. I got.
Enough buy car buy house and maybe boat?
I have a house and car but, alas, no boat.
No boat? She thinks, gnaws on a fingernail.
Why you no boat? I live, my dear,
more than a hundred miles away from the sea.
You stupid man, she declares simply,
boat and sea, they make you free.
You have Dollar, Euro, English Pound?
I should have listened more closely,
should have paid some more attention.
God, she was devilishly attractive!
blue-black hair, sloe-eyed, crimson lips,
grapefruit breasts, a tiny waist,
the full Oriental package.
After a short marriage and a long divorce
she took me to the cleaners.
She had a habit of clicking
her long fingernails on her teeth: tik –tik
and that’s the only thing, really, I can remember.
I remained a large frog in provincial ponds
after she took my money: Euros, Dollars, Pounds,
she discarded Equities, moved into Bonds.

A diamond ring I owned I gave you,
a diamond ring to wear on your right hand …

She’s thirty-something, divorced, no kids,
and I met her down at the gym.
Hi, says I, my name is Tim
and can I get you a grapefruit juice?
Whoever pressed that blessed grapefruit
changed my life. Hooee! She admired my
Abs, I said nice things about her flat tummy
and that’s how it all got started.
Several meetings, OK, of course we got chummy.
In the highway motel, three towns away,
trucks roared angrily past the windows
and demented moths attacked the lights
looking, they say, for the blackness beyond
when she strippped down to her bra and tights.
O Jesus Christ! I reeled away from the scars
that covered the whole of her back and thighs.
You’re a sweet guy, Tim, she said,
but I need it rough, you know?

But the vows you made, love, you went and broke them
and married the lassie that had the land.

In Alaska, having been thoroughly rejected
(that was then) on religious grounds by young Sarah Palin
I resolved to make something of myself
leaving behind the dead meese and gloomy igloos
and so I moved, God help us, to New Orleans
along the broad and courtly majestic river.
You don’t walk, you stumble and trip
on beer-borne, befabled Bourbon Street
where mulatto ladies call down from the railings
and life, in a daze, seems awful sweet.
Ya-ha-ha say the black old men,
here come Luke, Luke Skywalker,
he be sky walkin hee hee hee
so I drew myself up with dignity:
May a curse come down on you, I said,
may a flood come down and drown you!

I said nothing, I swear, about blacks or niggers,
or any of that knee-jerk nasty stuff
that just so easily rolls off the tongue
when blacks and whites they fall apart: my heart
was never in that. But what I did I think was worse.

Flood done come. The levees they break.
Katrina. Yep. I feel like I brought her down
with those unconsidered words flung out in the street
and I know that don’t make sense
but it do: words can kill people.
Now the bodies are cleared away, most of them,
but those black old men they hang on my soul
because I know that I killed them, condemned them,
even if they don’t be dead.

O Jesus, how can you bring something back?
Those silly words thrown out in anger?
A dead child, your own, so cold in the grave?
A moral lapse, an act of betrayal?
An act so shameful you cannot bear to think of it?

"If I'd married the lassie that had the land, my love
It's that I'll rue till the day I die ..


God, how I love the bar girls
even their heavy scent that makes me sick
with their smiles, and the music, click-click-click.
The Japanese ladies, precise and delicate,
feminine to a degree, with alas no chests,
make the Filipinas, more … rounded, seem so crude
although facially gorgeous. Another whiskey.
Look out, here come the dangerous Russians
with their ice-tone sculpted features,
with their careless arrogance and calculator minds.
It’s nice for a guy to have a bit of money
to throw away on hopeless dreams
while the rest of the world, or a lot of it, starves.
Natalie murmurs that she hates the Japanese
and slips her number into my palm.
I call her, big mistake, an affair begins,
and it nearly destroys my marriage.
We fall in love, not supposed to happen.
Here was I, steady and respected,
a man people trusted with their children,
thrown into the dust by a foreign whore
or so they said when the news got out.
But I couldn’t stay away from her
nor she from me … we hit on each other
like magnets, like crack cocaine.

Couldn’t stop, could not.

It ended in tears, these things always do.
Attractions like these
happen once or twice in a lifetime
or maybe never. You get wrung out
like an old dead sponge and you never
you never really come back from it
and people (nudge, nudge, wink)
they never let you neither.
I love my wife. I'll make it up to her.
It's like surviving a car crash.

When misfortune falls sure no man can shun it
I was blindfolded I'll ne'er deny

My several children rose in revolt
when I murmured thoughts of remarriage.
How can you do this, Daddy,
said my eldest daughter down the phone.
It’s just so-o-o disrespectful to Mommy.
Mommy, I said, is dead. She’s not coming back.
Me, I’m still here. Oh Daddy, she says, act your age!
I am acting my age. I’m alive. I want a woman.
Daddy, stop it! That’s disgusting.
You sound like a dirty old man.
Well, if I was married, I’d be legal, wouldn’t I?
Man has Sex with Wife
is not exactly a hanging offense.
O Daddy! She hangs up.
Next comes younger son, first telephone call
in what is this? five or six months:
Hey, Dad, you’re not serious!
Have you been studying, son?
That’s not what we are talking about here, Dad!
Says you. You think I am made of money?
Come on, Dad, you cannot marry this woman.
Yeah, I think you’re right.
What??
I don’t plan to marry Letitia Jones,
the neighbour, my own age, a saggy-titted old hag
with an uncertain temper, although
fair to say, she’s a ruddy good cook.
No, I plan to marry Latawna Fox.
(silence)
Hello?
Dad, you can’t. She’s … she’s BLACK!
So?
She’s, like, thirty years younger than you.
So?
Dad, you can’t do this!
Watch me. She’s like a bunny on springs.
Dad!!!
I hang up on him. Kids. Jesus.

Now at nights when I go to my bed of slumber
The thoughts of my true love run in my mind
When I turned around to embrace my darling
Instead of gold sure it's brass I find.

------------------------------------------------------------
* I lack the strength of will to control myself;
I am swept along, just like a helpless boat on the waves.
It's not only one kind of woman that excites my desires,
there are a hundred reasons I am always in love.
-- Ovid, Amores 2,4

[ray miller]

Well, there's a lot of it and much of it is very entertaining, brilliant in its way. This is not intended as derogatory, but I found myself thinking that this is what will become of rap when the white middle classes take it over. Like a hip Jimmy Carr, only funny.

[Sulpicia]

HI Dedalus
Just stopping by briefly and chose to spend my time reading one by you rather than ten by others! How could I resist a bit of Ovid at the top. But I have to say it seems more like Amores 2.4 (which is, as it happens, one of my favourites) than 1.2.
V. Ovidian: almost a collection of Metamorphoses. I'd like to read it again, but I'm not sure I've got the mental energy right now, and I know there's lots of stuff going on that I'm missing.
I love the way the different characters appear and disappear and you can never be sure how it all fits together. I'd like to give this to my Propertius class next semester: it's emblematic of the mess that most love is, hedged about with politics, society, family and all those other difficult conglomerations of people.
Really enjoyed it. One of your best, I reckon.
Helen

[dedalus]

Dear Helen ... in fact, dear dear Helen!

Thank you most kindly for stopping by, however briefly, at my shifting poetic tent. I am no Roman but a waveringly tolerant reflective Celt. I despise empire builders of any ilk. Your glancing attention revived my somewhat flagging spirits as I had put an extraordinary amount of time and thought into this poem and was beginning to feel a rather familiar sinking feeling as I watched it slowly, inexorably, disappearing down the list ... sinking out of sight, in fact, glug-glug, no two ways about it.

There was a paucity of views, this happens, and the one rather cryptic comment likened me to some contemporary British comedian I had never even heard of. Ovid might have enjoyed that. I am a bit of a comedian myself, fair to say, but more of the sit-down than the stand-up variety. What's keeping them drinks? Get a move on, there, before we all die of thirst!

I'm not always the best judge of my own poems. Ask me what I think are the best. Not now.

This comment on your comment is turning into a letter. So what?

Confiteor -- siquid prodest delicta frateri;
in mea nunc demens crimina fussus eo.

Ovid, Amores, 2.4 -- natch! Lines 3-4.

The lovely eclectic mix of 2.4, of course, is what got me going in the first place ... but ... but I thought it was just too bloody obvious as a lead-in so I "concealed" my tracks with just the hint of 1.2. Concealed them rather poorly, it seems, from you dear Cynthia ... oops, sorry, Helen, I'm always doing that with girls ... but it makes the Nose feel jealous over Propertius. He twists, poor man, in his Romanian exile grave.

So now, in your honour, and because I think it makes better sense ... both notions carry weight and one dare not presume to say which carries more ... take note that I have changed the opening lines -- the appetizer? -- to Ovid's lines from 2.4.

Ave atque vale,
Brendanus

PS - FWIW (for what it's worth): The "Ai" poem above has 2 definitely distinct persona, the chronology demands it, and possibly 3 or 4 or 5 more. The episodic nature of the poem does not require the re-appearance of former characters but readers will look for them all the same. We always do. The one writer who carried connections between his characters to the extreme was Charles Dickens. Check him out. I much prefer the cool contemporary cynicism of Thackeray. Both silly Brits, but one less silly than the other.

[ray miller]

As the writer of the rather cryptic comment I'd just like to say that I think you write brilliantly, and though I didn't think this was one of your best I'm surprised that it didn't receive more attention - if only from barrie and David telling you which bits to cut. Jimmy Carr is a very middle class comedian who strives to be funny but isn't. You have what I would refer to as a middle class, or "posh" voice and achieve comedic effect with apparent effortlessness. Ill give you an example. Your poems are long, meandering, very entertaining, erudite and difficult to follow. Even your comments are difficult to follow! So when you refer to my comment as "rather cryptic" I almost fell off the chair with laughter - and you weren't even trying! Seriously, I do think your writing very good, there was one a few months ago, can't recall the title, it ended in "that's maudlin to you, dear boy" and that was as impressive as anything I've read. Best wishes, Ray

[David]

Brendan, you beauty. Has this been around for a while? I hadn't noticed, but more fool me. I love it. It's one of those ones you do - infrequently, like all of us (at best) - that is head and shoulders above the rest.

I'm not going to suggest you cut this - Ray has some sort of castration fixation, unfortunately (hi Ray) - because the length is of the essence. And the essence is (partly) in the length, but what impresses me is the level of intensity you maintain through most (maybe all) of the damn thing.

I have a history of liking your stuff, but really liking the good stuff. I'm not going into train-spotterish detail with this. Holistically, I really like. I really like a lot.

And Helen wants to give it to her Propertius class! (Is that good, do you think?) I think it's brilliant.

Finally, you've capitalised the character in your title. AI, of course, as I'm sure you must know at some level of your Celtic brain, stands for Artifical Insemination. Is that a metaphor for the cultural adventures of the immigrant? Or is it just bollocks?

Cheers

David

[R. Broath]

Hi Brendan. I have read this (carefully) a couple of times and still feel unable to give any response which would be helpful. It has many qualities which I admire but could not emulate. Its episodic structure has a richness of tone which shows a joy in language characteristic of one at ease with ideas and the expression of those ideas.
This is not a road I would (or could) take but I appreciate the skill involved in this.
Not the most insightful review you will receive but then I do not profess expert critical skills.

Jimmy