“A scratch, a scratch…” I’ve said that way too much today

A Plague On Both Your Houses

The story delivered via movie (10)
A tale of star cross’d lovers, taken as (10)
Either a lamentable tragedy, (10)
Or comedy, lest either view offends. (10)

The viewers that day were unimpressed (9)
Anguished cries turn to punchline in their ears (10)
Cottoned; by their cocoon protected (9)
Willing to unknow- death is ever near. (10)

What then is death to them but a word? (9)
Call you it kindness to force these youths emergence, (12)
Then on fresh untried wings, to battle have them gird (12)
These then insincere, unhappy youths? (9)

I return to the question old as thought (10)
Is it bliss against which I’ve always fought? (10)

Yeah, so they played the Leo DiCaprio Romeo + Juliet for a school group at work twice this week. A lot of the high schoolers weren’t keen on sitting through the whole thing, and of course it’s those noisy kids that get all the attention. But I love that movie, it’s so energetic, I don’t know the name of the one technique involved but there’s a trick where they speed up the actors onscreen in a choppy fashion (yeah yeah, fast forward) but it’s really nineties. And awesome.

So it made me want to do a bit of stanza work. Man, you should see what the first stanza looked like! It sucked. I mean more so than now. It was super super bland, it just had zero energy. Of course now I’ve basically stolen all the energy that exists intrinsically in the words “star cross’d lovers”. And now that I think of it, “view offends” is pretty reminiscent of the Puck speech ending A Midsummer Nights Dream.

I did far less rework on the remaining stanzas- I WANTED to change “Anguished cries turn to punchline in their ears” because you read it and you just want it to end in eyes for the fuller internal rhyme with cries- but that wouldn’t make any sense! Everything about the line is audible… ah I couldn’t figure it out. As it stands it’s pretty discordant and sudden, which I guess is okay.

I do enjoy using the word “gird” in something, and the two line… uh… what is that thing called? You know, the ending. Well, I really like those lines. The innocence versus experience thing, you know?

Of course I’ve added the syllable count to show that I am aware of it, and tried to stick to a pattern within each stanza- the (10) lines representing simplicity and then as it grows to a greater discrepancy (it’s crescendo reached in the third stanza with sudden distance between (9) and (12) ) to show how complicated things become as you move away from that innocence.

That’s pretty much everything about this thing. I didn’t worry about patterns of strong-weak syllables (all that pentameter type stuff) because I just haven’t developed the ear for that kind of thing- so if you see/hear anything that SOUNDS like I gave it a particular metre, well I didn’t. Credit goes to where it belongs, either me, or the coincidence fairy.

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A friend of mine has a show on tomorrow at the Silver Dollar room, it’s her bands CD release, and I’m really looking forward to it. I'll busy myself with being incredibly amazed by the performance. It’s always a lot of fun, high energy, personable- even while she goes “yeah, man, we just didn’t do that well today” and I sit there flabbergasted.

***
A trick I picked up my last year of high school for posture was to pretend to have a string attached to the top of your head that’s pulling you up- so that’s what I’ve done whenever I’ve thought to correct my posture. This past week I’ve mixed it up, experimenting with an imaginary string atop my head as well as my chest and diaphragm. I’m quite pleased with the result, a satisfying firmness in my abdominals in addition to being super tall.

That paragraph just sounds self aggrandizing, but come on- I’m describing myself as walking around with what is essentially the mental image of a marionette. Does that not sound funny?

Oh man, I was going to talk about how much I’m enjoying this book “Père Goriot” but I’ve gone on long enough. And I can’t really do it tomorrow because of my friends show… Saturday? That works fine for me, I’ll even be done the book by then, so all the better.

I’ll mark my calendar.

I don’t think I have a calendar right now.