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The King's Job

The Tudor Monarchy

Once on a time was a King anxious to understand
What was the wisest thing a man could do for his land.
Most of his population hurried to answer the question,
Each with a long oration, each with a new suggestion.
They interrupted his meals--he wasn't safe in his bed from 'em--
They hung round his neck and heels, and at last His Majesty fled
from 'em.
He put on a leper's cloak (people leave lepers alone),
Out of the window he broke, and abdicated his throne.
All that rapturous day, while his Court and his ministers mourn
him,
He danced on his own highway till his own Policeman warned
him.
Gay and cheerful he ran (lepers don't cheer as a rule)
Till he found a philosopher-man teaching an infant-school.
The windows were open wide, the King sat down on the grass,
And heard the children inside reciting "Our King is an ass."

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poem by Rudyard Kipling
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Victory Operation Enduring Freedom?

global observers
New York post
9/11 aftermath

allies enemies
with baited breath
wondered at

responses
as bombs
fell every

six seconds on
capital Kabul Afghanistan
without mercy...

Operation Enduring Freedom
stated ploy goal of dismantling
al-Qaeda terrorist organization

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poem by Terence George Craddock
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Faceless This Time Of Night

Faceless this time of night, my skin evaporates like dry ice
into a deepening sense of containment
by a dark space with distant cities of light
trying to colonize the Pythagorean fireflies of Cretona,
or the shimmering mirage of Port Angeles
dancing like a seance at the foot of the mountains
across a hundred miles of the Georgia Strait at night,
the immensity of the freedom that dwarfs the stars
with the sheer magnitude of the labour before them.

The fragility of a spinal cord traversing the abyss
of a one-stringed box guitar made of cardboard
when you were a kid, the mere filament
of an anachronistic light bulb with the lifespan
of the wick of an apostate candle at a black mass,
disappointed it wasn't born a flower,
but a weed more at home among the stars
that uprooted it from its intimacy with the earth
like a kindred spirit of light
that must wander through its own solitude

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poem by Patrick White
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Averaging Out the Crucials

Averaging out the crucials, rolling against the odds,
I've worn my bones down like dragon's teeth
grinding starwheat into luminous loaves of bread
that break just like the heart you share with a stranger.
Or a fortune-cookie of fate. Gray seagull of a day,
a deserted beach on Vancouver Island in the morning,
as I recall it from five thousand miles away,
the windows still numb and hungover
from last night's sunset dispensing with protocol
and letting it all hang out oceanically.
Dying flowers mishandled by the wind like old manuscripts
too wet and esoteric to start a fire with.
Sodden mystics expiring like blueweed in the broken grass.
Fifty years I've run before circumstances like a blue fox
being hunted down by crows in the deep snow
but they haven't dipped their nibs
in the inkwells of my eyes yet and I'm
an excellent broken field street runner with the wiles
of someone who's good at who they don't want to be.

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poem by Patrick White
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I Remember Loving You

I remember loving you.
You turned my heart into a koan I haven't cracked yet.
You were a muse of dark matter.
A Mayan phase of the moon
that kept your predictions to yourself.
You were the unified field theory
that made me feel I knew why I was here.
That my abysmal ignorance
was the ore
of infinite enlightenments to come
each one a world of its own
we were free to start with each other.
I remember touching your skin
as if I were reaching out to a ghost
to see if it was real.
Even now after all these years
I can recall the sensation
as if I were holding
a first folio edition of Shakespeare
that no one knew anything about.

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poem by Patrick White
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Sacred And Profane Love

In the dark shadow of the windless pines
Whose gloomy glory lines the obsequies
Of the gaunt Claudian Aqueduct along
The lone Campagna to sepulchral Rome,
A Northern youth, companionless, reclined,
Pondering on records of the Roman Past,
Kingdom, Republic, Empire, longwhile gone.
Hard-by, through marble tomb revivified,
Rippled and bubbled water crystalline,
Inwelling from the far-off Sabine hills.
When lo! upon the tomb's deep-dinted rim
Slowly there broadened on his gaze two shapes,
Material embodiment of those
The great Venetian in resplendent hues
Upon the canvas lastingly portrayed,
Christened by fame Profane and Sacred Love.
One was in rich habiliments arrayed,
With dimpling folds about her rounded limbs,
And heaving corset of embossed brocade,
Compressing beaker for her brimming breasts.

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poem by Alfred Austin
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The Dunciad: Book I.

The Mighty Mother, and her son who brings
The Smithfield muses to the ear of kings,
I sing. Say you, her instruments the great!
Called to this work by Dulness, Jove, and Fate;
You by whose care, in vain decried and cursed,
Still Dunce the second reigns like Dunce the first;
Say how the Goddess bade Britannia sleep,
And poured her spirit o’er the land and deep.
In eldest time, e’er mortals writ or read,
E’er Pallas issued from the Thunderer’s head,
Dulness o’er all possessed her ancient right,
Daughter of Chaos and eternal Night:
Fate in their dotage this fair idiot gave,
Gross as her sire, and as her mother grave,
Laborious, heavy, busy, bold, and blind,
She ruled, in native anarchy, the mind.
Still her old empire to restore she tries,
For, born a goddess, Dulness never dies.
O thou! whatever title please thine ear,
Dean, Drapier, Bickerstaff, or Gulliver!

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poem by Alexander Pope
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Griselda: A Society Novel In Verse - Chapter I

An idle story with an idle moral!
Why do I tell it, at the risk of quarrel
With nobler themes? The world, alas! is so,
And who would gather truth must bend him low,
Nor fear to soil his knees with graveyard ground,
If haply there some flower of truth be found.
For human nature is an earthy fruit,
Mired at the stem and fleshy at the root,
And thrives with folly's mixon best o'erlaid,
Nor less divinely so, when all is said.
Brave lives are lived, and worthy deeds are done
Each virtuous day, 'neath the all--pitying sun;
But these are not the most, perhaps not even
The surest road to our soul's modern Heaven.
The best of us are creatures of God's chance
(Call it His grace), which works deliverance;
The rest mere pendulums 'twixt good and ill,
Like soldiers marking time while standing still.
'Tis all their strategy, who have lost faith
In things Divine beyond Man's life and death,

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poem by Wilfrid Scawen Blunt
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Flowers Are The Clocks Of The Light

Flowers are the clocks of the light.
Spring grey. Clouds. Half smoke, half crocus.
The rivulets are carrying last November's leaves away
like long lines of ants bearing the gnostic gospels
of the snow thawing into a spiritual life of water
back to the shrine of their colony
to be chewed over by the divines
masticating the mystery into something
like an edible orthodoxy of mystic impiety.

My heart is a bruised apple with purple blood today.
Neither passionate, nor aloof, clinging
nor unwilling to let go if that's what I must do.
One foot on shore. One in a lifeboat.
O what funny bridges we make as if
we were trying to balance the axis
of heaven and earth upon our nose
like the calves of giraffes learning to walk on stilts.
But there you go. What are you going to do?
That's the way it seems.

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poem by Patrick White
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Kensington Garden

______ Campos, ubi Troja fuit.
Virg.

Where Kensington, high o'er the neighbouring lands
Midst greens and sweets, a regal fabric, stands,
And sees each spring, luxuriant in her bowers,
A snow of blossoms, and a wild of flowers,
The dames of Britain oft in crowds repair
To gravel walks, and unpolluted air.
Here, while the town in damps and darkness lies,
They breathe in sun-shine, and see azure skies;
Each walk, with robes of various dyes bespread,
Seems from afar a moving tulip-bed,
Where rich brocades and glossy damasks glow,
And chints, the rival of the showery bow.
Here England's daughter, darling of the land,
Sometimes, surrounded with her virgin band,
Gleams through the shades. She, towering o'er the rest,
Stands fairest of the fairer kind confest,

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poem by Thomas Tickell
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