Dubiouser and Dubiouser...?

Ahem... well, the dubious poetry came out rather fucked up, didn't it? The formatting went weird, and I have no idea why... nor any inclination to sort it out right now.

It's 4:30 in the morning and besides, it's not a new poem so I've gone off it long ago. To quote the Dude himself: "Fuck it."

I will leave it to the deities that control such things and leave the mess in place, claiming psychedelic inspiration for the unintentional desecration of my uptight Petrarchanism...

~ Om Mane Padme Hum ~

Dubious Poetry, Anyone?

Here's a poem I wrote as an exercise, not having done such a thing in years. It's a Petrarchan sonnet on the subject of my first experience under LSD... and, yes, it's very bad indeed!

Lysergic Sonnet

Back when the Mondays were the Stones and the Roses were the Beatles and I gave a shit,
me and Heidi, backlit by MTV, each placed a square of blotter on our tongues and felt
that special imaginary bitterness, waited the breathless wait, an hour until I said It
isn't working, then oh, fuck – blurring, expanding, pleasure shivers, a melt

ing wave of laughter – spinal column vibrating, all six senses on fire – the world
malleable, strange, brand new – the commencement of ego-death – the lesser
subsumed by the greater – a fat Buddha in flight, we watched his white wings unfurl
ing in beatific dissolution – pulsing, now – Albert Hoffmann Vs. Mad Professor

throbbing in the walls – lost in thought, word, wallpaper – pattern of music in my
pores morphing into breathing rhythm, hallucinating rhythm – Primal Scream
exhorting come together – a nexus, perfect alignment, an explosion of utter clarity
minutes impersonating hours imitating eternity in a split-second flash – a dream

that never ended but burnt off like mist in the soft pink sunrise – we ended
up waving goodbye in the rosy radiance – wordless, happy, united, boundaries transcended.

(Dedicated to Heidi Rocke - hey babe, you out there?)

Clamp: The One I Love

I bought this for Plaxy for Christmas, but I think I liked it more than she did...

It's actually by half of Clamp, written by Nanase Ohkawa with cute, ultra-girly art by Mick Nekoi – the look is kind of a hybrid of Clamp-style cool and old-school shojo. The book is a slender collection of twelve seven-page stories on the theme of love, each based around a single word (my favourites were “Aitai”, I miss you, and “Kirei”, pretty) and accompanied by a short essay.

It's a more satisfying read than the size and format perhaps imply, and because each story is so like a natural little train of thought (a feeling reinforced by the brief, amusing essays) the overall impression amounts to more than you'd expect. The stories are highly personal and rather literary in flavour – like a lot of manga shorts, they're more impressionistic than an artsy Western comic would dare to be, and the content is very ordinary and universal – not quite what we expect from the creators of Magic Knight Rayearth!

A fun, unusual shojo manga that's well worth checking, especially if you've never ready any romantically-inclined comics before.