Archive for the ‘Poetry’ Category
August 30, 2026
(all the way at the end, we get to some sexual street talk, which I think has exactly the right shock value for its context; but if s*cking c*ck offends you, skip the next-to-last sentence)
It starts with Steven Levine — a sparkling vehicle of joy, enthusiasm, and congeniality — roused to anger and protest, as I reported in the 8/3 posting “Two notes on gay moral purpose”:
SL breaks out in a combination of, on the one hand, genuine pride in occasions of humane concern and (to put it grandly) moral purpose in the gay world and, on the other, righteous anger at a long-standing tradition in psychology, sociology, and medicine of blanketly treating homosexuality as dysfunction and disease. With, as sideshow, celebration of the raw sexuality in homosexuality — recognizing the physical and emotional pleasures of the associated sexual practices — in the wonderful BIG FAG t-shirts created by Steven (which he’d been distributing with abandon at Amsterdam Pride).
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Posted in Art, Clothing, Homosexuality, Language and the body, Language of sex, Moral worlds, Music, My life, Poetry, Social interactions, Social life | Leave a Comment »
August 27, 2026
Some weeks back, in midsummer, I sat at my worktable as night drew to an end, when sunrise broke out magnificently in my window wall (see photo #1 in my 8/25 posting “Where I live”) and filled me with joy at the gift of a new day. Also triggering an avalanche of musical associations — conveying fresh beginnings (as here), or rebirth (both of them in Schubert lieder, to come below), or (as in Mahler’s Symphony No. 2, also to come below), resurrection. (There’s more, lots more; I’ll list only a tiny sampling, from the odd trio of Haydn, Grieg, and Grofé — ok, Lambert, Hendricks, and Ross, they’re not))
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Posted in German, Language and religion, Music, My life, Poetry | 2 Comments »
July 12, 2026
(I have so many things to write about that I’m just throwing up my arms and posting about the most trivial thing to come my way today; this is about my misreading of one word from an article in The Economist issue of 7/4/26). The item “American power: Strength in numbers: An empirical look at America on its 250th birthday reveals a country that is mighty — but becoming less dominant” begins with a compressed history of the American economy, from 1820 on. Then (with my misreading bold-faced):
Fuelled by war, colonisation and the industrial revolution, the British Empire overtook China as the world’s largest economy around 1840, when the first opium war between the countries was under way.
… The invention of the cotton gin in 1793 and brutal deployment of slave labour meant that the country produced most of the world’s cotton by the 1850s. America expanded, often violently, westward, gaining natural resources that would be the envy of the world.
Sprawling forests supplied timber for rapid construction. Well-positioned poets and the sweeping Mississippi river provided routes for export. …
Much as I love the idea of well-positioned poets providing economic heft — I am something of a poet myself — the actual text was of course about well-positioned ports, not poets. I just have poetry on the brain.
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Posted in Errors, Misreadings, My life, Poetry | Leave a Comment »
June 27, 2026
Briefly noted. From my posting yesterday (6/26) “Enjoy your night in Tunisia”, in response to Lise Menn, a comment about:
the music; I wanted to open up “A Night in Tunisia”, encourage people to discover the early [Dizzy] Gillespie-[Charlie] Parker collaborations, maybe to go on to discover that words got added to it [more than once, in fact] and it was eventually performed and recorded by almost every jazz or just jazzy vocalist(s) there is (Ella did it, Manhattan Transfer did it) and that most of that is in fact fabulous, genuinely a precious part of our cultural heritage
As it happens, this has been a dire day for my spirit, filled with such intense anxiety about the worth of my work that I was reduced to reading through old postings, looking for examples of things I wrote that might have been of value to at least a few of my readers. The triggers for this despair were multiple, but it turned out that sleep deprivation was high on the list; life is considerably better after three one-hour naps.
Then I went back to Ella Fitzgerald, a deep pleasure since I saw her perform live back in the 1960s.
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Posted in Music, My life, Poetry | Leave a Comment »
June 15, 2026
(fairly quickly detours into phenomenally raunchy free verse and then swivels again — but in there’s some stuff that’s way out of bounds for kids and the sexually modest)
I was roused from my pastoral torpor this morning by a Facebook ad from the Tastefully Simple® website offering basic preparation directions for Key Lime Cheese Ball Mix. And I immediately fell into a Zippyesque seizure of onomatomania, moved to chanting Key lime cheese ball, Key lime cheese ball, Key lime cheese ball. Then, being the sort of person that I am, I entertained a delightful reverie of citrus-juice-sharp, aged-cheese-ripe testicles and on from there, culminating in that unseemly verse. Then from there I speculated some on why some forms of sensuous pleasure have become particularly poignant for me these days.
Now to spool through all of this. Beginning with the ad.
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Posted in Gender and sexuality, Homosexuality, Language and food, Language and the body, Language of sex, My life, Poetry | 2 Comments »
June 5, 2026
(dripping with raunchy sexual content, entirely unsuitable for kids and the sexually modest)
Not what TSE had in mind, but peach-eating was the topic for some bros in a Facebook reel that came by me this morning. Another chapter in the great book of schemes for talking about analingus without sounding really gross. (And the topic comes up because a great many people find the act deeply pleasant to receive, and a fair number of us find it satisfying to perform, for the sense of bodily intimacy it affords, as a display of insertive dominance (for its own sake or as foreplay to fucking someone), as a offering of submissive service (for its own sake or as foreplay to getting fucked), or for some amorphous swirl of such feelings.
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Posted in Argument structure, Emoji, Language and the body, Language of sex, Metaphor, Poetry, Puns, Signs and symbols, Syntax, Taboo language and slurs | Leave a Comment »
May 31, 2026
Hey, there, server lad,
Have you any wool?
Yes, sir, yes, sir,
One alpaca full!
This Drew Dernavich cartoon in the 6/1/26 issue of the New Yorker:
A wonderfully absurd riff on the custom of restaurant servers offering freshly ground black pepper (occasionally, also freshly ground sea salt) upon the appearance of food at the table, obliging the diners to participate in a pretentious edgy ritual of condiment dispensation
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Posted in Language and food, Linguistics in the comics, Music, Parodies, Poetry, Pop culture | 1 Comment »
May 25, 2026
(a dip into the rhetorical organization of texts and into figurative language, but getting its raw material from gay porn and so it’s going to be entirely unsuitable for kids and the sexually modest)
In the opening of Raging Stallion’s 2024 porn flick Tourist Attractions (scenes from the stream of visitors to Beau Butler’s (fantasy) rental house in Barcelona), BB explains the pleasures of the city:
I like to take in everything Barcelona has to offer: art, culture, food, cock — you know, the basics.
Thus launching this seaside D&A S&F circus with a stroke of comic bathos. From the high level of art and culture, dropping to the artful and cultivated satisfaction of an animal need and then plunging to what we think of as raw vulgar pleasure.
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Posted in Allusion, Bathos, Figurative language, Gay porn, Jokes, Language and the body, Language of sex, Metaphor, Poetry, Pop culture, Porn actors | Leave a Comment »
