Limerick #20: ABBAA

His punchlines always came first.
Couldn't hold a thought --
And he often forgot --
Where suspense tends to fare worst,
There was that limericist from Amherst...

(A "good" editor would, of course, reverse the line order:

There was that limericist from Amherst...
Where suspense tends to fare worst,
And he often forgot --
Couldn't hold a thought --

His punchlines always came first.)

Unison

 "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times,..., it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, ..."
- Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities.

It was the best of times, 
it was the worst of times, 
it was the age of wisdom, 
it was the age of foolishness, 
it was the epoch of belief, 
it was the epoch of incredulity, 
it was the season of Light, 
it was the season of Darkness, 
it was the spring of hope, 
it was the winter of despair.

It was a time for the worst,
it was a time for the best,
it was the era of greed,
it was the era of contentment,
it was the hour of need,
it was the hour of magnanimity,
it was the sentence of sloth,
it was the sentence of industry,
it was the solstice of incongruence,
it was the equinox of symmetry.

But, it must be said,
it was not the crossroads of triumph,
nor the crossroads of disaster.
People remember it that way,
but there's more nostalgia in that than truth.
Likewise,
it was not the rule of warmth,
it was not the rule of cold,
wasn't the cycle of love,
wasn't the cycle of indifference,
not the chapter of comfort,
not the chapter of angst.
By utterly no means was it the chapter of angst.

A closer reading of history will prove that,
in reality,
it was the tenure of solitude,
it was the tenure of company,
it was the spell of calm,
it was the spell of wrath,
it was the adolescence of disarray,
it was the dotage of indulgence.

Maybe it was the aeon of vanity,
maybe it wasn't,
but I'm one hundred percent certain that
it was the aeon of humility.
Then again,
it was the semester of silence,
it was the semester of prolixity,
it was the nanosecond of haste,
it was the millennium of patience,
so alright, I'm not all that sure.

I have been going around saying
it was the eyeblink of serendipity,
and sometimes the eyeblink of ill fortune,
that it was the jiffy of surfeit,
and--against all odds--the jiffy of shortfall.
So picture my astonishment when I looked up my diary
and saw, in my own writing, that actually
it was the heartbeat of crisis,
it was the heartbeat of harmony,
it was the two shakes of a lamb's tail of ailment,
it was the two shakes of a lamb's tail of health.

To think that if certain events had transpired a tiny bit differently,
it could have been the interlude of movement,
it could have been the interlude of stillness,
could've been the twilight of superstition,
could've been the dawn of reason, 
would have been the history of the beginning,
if not the beginning of history.

At any rate, back then they said soon
it will be a time for the best,
it will be a time for the worst,
it will be the session of passion,
it will be the session of chastity,
it will be the debut of suspense,
it will be the swansong of reminiscence.

Well, look around.
It ain't the debut of suspense,
it ain't the bloody swansong of reminiscence,
it is the bout of voracity,
it is the bout of temperance,
it is the cadence of faith,
it is the cadence of empiricism,
it is the Jurassic of habit,
it is the Atomic of invention.

That is why I don't like making imprecise statements about durations.
But I do have a pretty sharp memory for the spatial aspects of times.
I can tell you, for instance, that
it was the best of places,
it was the worst of places,
it was the kingdom of heaven,
it was the kingdom of limbo,
it was the chamber of glass,
it was the chamber of secrets,
it was the land of the gleeful,
it was the home of the grave,
it was the epicentre of action,
it was the shell of idyll,
the ballpark of conjecture,
the bullseye of accuracy,
the right of apathy,
the left of candour,
the surface of politeness,
the depth of compassion.

Believe me, I had taken measurements. 

Collateral Adjectives: an Introduction

It looks like a long poem but 

something about the opening line 

gets my attention.

I quite like how it cuts to the chase 

with the metaphor of 

adopting a dog versus an infant.

How it patiently elaborates 

that neither aqueous nor watery 

would have a life of its own without water, 

but that only one of them 

can be mistaken for a biological child 

of the noun.

I don't know about you, but

I personally find that a nice explanation 

of the titular subject.

Which is why I don't mind

when a couple more examples 

are shoehorned in, like end vs terminal, 

and moon vs lunar.

There is even a joke 

about collateral and loan words 

that I'm willing to give a polite chuckle.

At the same time I also begin to suspect here

that the poem is perhaps not really about collateral adjectives, 

that maybe it wants to do something else altogether,

something that reminds me of adjective vs epithetic.

Out of nowhere then comes this river in South Bend, Indiana.

There is that phrase, 

ribbon of sparkling silver, 

which I love, but there are also those two names, 

St Joseph and Sakiwasipi.

So presumably this is another metaphor.

That much is confirmed in the next line,

when we learn that St Joseph is the version

that freezes over, runs in 

straight lines, or beneath 

unsightly bridges, or by 

the crowded pier at Lake Michigan 

into which it merges and 

disappears against the clouded sunset beyond,

whereas when called Sakiwasipi the river

ripples under cackling geese 

and meanders 

under luminous spring clouds,

once having overdone it and

leaving behind 

a lake shaped like a horseshoe,

perfectly still,

a giant mirror 

into which bright yellow trees 

hang upside down, pointing 

to the clear blue sky 

at the bottom. 

It's not obvious to me what I'm supposed to make 

of that frenzy of imagery -- 

but I am left with no time 

to turn it over the swivels of my brain, 

because the poem now puts its arms together in front of it

and dives into a second big analogy.

This is when it gets tiresome, technical -- 

yes, I get that no single ancestor 

gave bats and dolphins 

their common blessing of echolocation, 

but do I really care that nor did 

one etymological great-grandmother 

spawn east and oriental?

That word, convergent evolution, 

makes me wince: 

it should have no place in poetry.

I want to go to the next stanza already.

Only it turns out to be 

a curiously defensive one, like

it is trying to prove a point.

Speaking for myself, though, I felt it had its moments,

like the spiel about how some collaterals

function as euphemism. 

The one with cystic vs bladder,

the one about mortal remains for dead body,

and my favourite, gluteal vs buttock.

But hang on, hymeneal vs marriage

shouldn't belong here.

That sounds to me like 

the opposite of euphemistic. 

We then go off on 

an unnecessary moralistic tangent on what it feels like to

savour stewed goose and smoked steak versus 

bite into birds and bison.

I suppose that was for those s's and b's.

Next we are abruptly dropped into the periodic table 

and asked to contemplate stannic acid 

and ferrous oxide and Auric Goldfinger.

Then it gets awkward with 

all those obscure collaterals for common nouns, though I dig the one on 

hodiernal vs today. Yummm.

Also, estival vs summer. 

Estival cracks me up.

The final bit here is for me the best, 

the one with all the sneaky types, 

you know, the ones we use all the time 

but don't think of as collaterals.

Like I am startled that second and best

slipped under my radar just now.

To be honest, the next stanza loses me completely.

Do I really need to use digital exchange 

in place of fingers crossed? 

Sure, feline and canine precipitation 

faintly tickles me,

but xeric uniformity? Colour me unimpressed. 

That's not even what "just deserts" really means.

That also goes for the one on 

carpal gyration vs wrist spin.

And maybe I'm just too cynical at this point, 

but dextral absence for right away 

strikes me as too clever by half. 

I sense the poem is in panic mode now,

as if guilty of having 

bullet lists masquerading as its stanzas.

Pitiful, really.

  

I am pretty inspired, though, 

to see it recover to hit some high notes 

in the final stanza.

Those nouns lacking collaterals 

do make a good theme for wrapping things up.

Like when we are challenged 

to produce one for sin or Portugal or TV, 

I, for one, fail to.

And it is odd indeed that window has fenestral 

and door has nothing.

Pet haters? Ha, that's a good name -- 

having me doubt if the original metaphor 

was set up for this payoff.

(Then the volume of my mind 

inexplicably turns down as I read 

that side remark on how sooner or later 

I'd be thinking of the collateral shelter 

as one boasting no unclaimed animals.)

And I really like the way the examples 

in this category are juxtaposed.

The cake, guillotine, democracy sequence 

is a nice touch, for instance.

But also coffee, bean, cup. 

It gets me when we then immediately go

from coffee to scatological.

Seeing how the clock on the poem 

is running out, I become curious 

about how it is going to end. 

That is when I am a trifle jarred, 

but mostly amused, to discover that, 

in its own words, 

"As a poem do I long to sound,

 as thy eyeballs come southbound."

Fancy.

Tinted Mirrors

I chuckle when I see negatron. What an arch way to say
electron, it isn't like its positronic evil twin is
on everyone's mind all the time. Then
there's tardyon. It's just as well
that there is a word for particles slower than light. Like
a word for fish that stay in water. I like
words for such comforting ideas. The scientists must, too, for
why else would there be two surplus words for
a spectacularly vanilla species? They must want every last
tardyon, bardyon or ittyon to
ward off the tachyons at large. Speaking of tachyon, I like talkie.
I'm tickled by "Madras Talkies". We won't be showing you intertitles, they
assure me. We have 1x framespeed.
Perhaps the working title of every Jane Austen novel was
"Straight People".

There must be a word for these words, tinted mirrors on which
images of the commonplace shimmer in
and out.
Like earthling. I like earthling. It brings up that picture of
our watery orb sighted as an exoplanet, a picture I fancy more than the
Pale Blue Dot. See, I'm partial to earthling because it takes
earthlings to hang up inward-looking telescopes on the firmament to squint at
earthlings.
These are the telescopes -- I'm switching metaphors here -- that resolve me as a
mortal, noting how I don't fling javelins of lightning. They photograph me as a
muggle, seeing as I don't travel by broom. They file me as
wetware, zooming into my CAPTCHA tests. They scan my innards,
nod at each other. Non-gravid, they agree, perhaps following a pregnant
pause.

Clerihews #17-18: Babbage

Charles Babbage
Had spare cabbage.
He put it in a while loop
And made eternal soup.

Charles Babbage
Served soup of cabbage.
The recipe for the starter
Was by Byron's daughter.