Useful and Accepted Definitions that will help you survive and proceed in the modern world...

IMAGINATION: Always "lively." Be on guard against it. When lacking in oneself, attack it in others. To write a novel, all you need is imagination.

FRICASSEE: Only good in the country.

ABSINTHE: Extra-violent poison: one glass and you're dead. Newspapermen drink it when they write their copy. Has killed more soldiers than the Bedouin.

Io non mori, e non rimasi vivo: I did not die, but nothing remained the same. In the evening it was the mosquitoes, and in the day tsetse flies with wings swept back like tiny jet fighters. I feel discomfort, therefore I am alive...

EXILE LETTER

Ezra Pound: after Li Po

Red jade cups, food well set, on a blue jeweled table
And I was drunk, and had no thought of returning
You would walk out with me to the Western corner of the castle
To the dynastic temple, the water around it as clear as blue jade
With boats floating, and the sound of mouth-organs and drums
With ripples like dragon-scales going grass-green on the water
Pleasure lasting, and courtezans going and coming without Hindrance with the willow-flakes falling like snow
And the vermilioned girls getting drunk about sunset
And the waters a hundred feet deep reflecting green eyebrows 
Eyebrows painted green are a fine sight in the young moonlight 

And the girls singing back at each other
Dancing in transparent brocade
And the winds lifting up the song, and interrupting it
Tossing it under the clouds

                              

                                     We are the hollow men
                                     We are the stuffed men
                                      Leaning together
                                      Heads filled with straw
                                      Shape without form
                                      Shade without color
                                      Our dried voices when
                                      We whisper together
                                      Are quiet and meaningless
                                      As wind in dry grass
                                      Or rats' feet on broken glass
                                      In our dry cellars
                                   
                                   

But among the jackals, the panthers, the bitch hounds,

The apes, the scorpions, the vultures, the serpents,
The yelping, howling, growling, crawling monsters
In the filthiest menagerie of our vices,
There is one more ugly, more wicked, more filthy.
He is boredom: you know him reader, that refined monster.

Folly, error, sin, avarice
Occupy our minds and labour our bodies
And we feed our pleasant remorse
As beggars nourish their vermin.

                           


            The autumn moon silently lights the green water,
            And the girls all row out into the lake to gather
            Water lilies.
            The lotus blooms so charmingly that it seems to whisper
            And break those girls hearts with its pale beauty.

            Li Po

                                   A stand of people
                                   by an open

                                   grave underneath
                                   the heavy leaves
 
                                   celebrates
                                   the cut and fill
 
                                   for the new road
                                   where
 
                                    an old man
                                    on his knees
     
                                    reaps a basket
                                    full of
                   
                                    matted grasses for
                                    his goats                               

                                           

YOU TO COME

by Kurt McGill

I asked you to come

Out on the porch

Where the air was wet

The azure sky streaked

With twisted white bed sheets

And airplanes going to Malaga

Under the thrall of your tablet

Converted rice cooking

Quietly in the background

Without our lost onions

Or secret scents of saffron

Demurring…you said…

Maybe I’ll join

You later