Flower battle

Enter and stand
Enter, leap at, roaring
Back slowly off

Roar, shake arm, roll on back
Eat earth, throw rocks
Rush at and past opponent

Avoid, show back

Leap at opponent’s back
Miss
Return

(Without looking) avoid
Turn to face opponent

Catch head with rear hand (without looking)
strike head with forearm

Rise, stagger, roll on back
Roar, shake arm, leap on head

Avoid, back off
Roar, pursue
Leap at roaring

Grasp head with forearm
flick rear arm in arc
strike downward blow

Sag, moan, rise
leap and crush in bear hug
lift in air

Draw dagger
Stab in chest

Fall on back
Die

Advance calmly, inspect corpse
Back off

Basic fighting movements: a section of the perang kembang (flower battle) from a puppeteer’s handbook for the study of wayang kulit or Javanese shadow play. As found in On Thrones of Gold, ed. James Brandon, (Hawaii 1993). Submitted by Grace Andreacchi.

From The Gentleman’s Companion, Volume Two

Being an Exotic Drinking Book, or
Around the World with Jigger, Beaker,
And Flask: THE SAIGON SPECIAL,
another ODD DRINK from the CAPITAL
CITY OF FRENCH INDO-CHINA & DATING
from the YEAR 1925…
This dates back to 19-
25 when the good old SS RESOLUTE
stopped in French Indo-China, and some
of our friends undertook to fly upriver
as near to the marvellous Cambodian
ruins of Angkor, as might be sane,
then motor back via Pnom Penh—imagine
a place called Pnom Penh—to Bangkok
to meet ship again at Pak Nam….
The plane reminded us of a celery crate
decorated, respectively, with an electric fan
and an evinrude motor. It sputtered and
died finally coming to rest on the Saigon
River, with no chance to walk home….
This addition to any anthology of damp-
ness was one remembered aftermath
when back in Saigon, and muttering about
the contrariness of fate generally.
On checking we find that it is a slightly
sweeter Jerusalem Between-
the Sheets, plus a nip of egg white.

From The Gentleman’s Companion: Being an Exotic Drinking Book or, Around the World with Jigger, Beaker, and Flask Vol.2, CH Baker (New York, 1946). Submitted by Jerome.

The smoke that thunders

Plateau forests
Of ponderosa pine and Douglas-fir,

Cypresses that creep
Far into the water.

Under the sun that never sets
Below the smoke that thunders.

Taken from Rough Guide Ultimate Adventures, September 2008. The descriptions refer to the Grand Canyon, the Atchafalaya Basin and the Arctic Victoria Falls. By Harriet.

But Not All of the Time

Any case
in which people pursue
a single great experience or accomplishment
that occurs infrequently
or perhaps not at all –

a Holy grail,
an impossible dream,
a brilliant model,
a great white whale –

is a case of
a positively skewed distribution
in which they may be
predicted to be

unhappy
most of the time.

From the book Social Comparison Processes: Theoretical and Empirical Perspectives (1977) edited by J.M. Suls and R. L. Miller. In the chapter “Pleasure and Pain of Social Comparison,” pp. 149-186. Submitted by Kate L.

Saying true things

I’m in love with you
and I’m not in the business
of denying myself
the simple pleasure of
saying
true
things
I’m in love with you
and I know that
love is just a shout
into the void
and that
oblivion is inevitable
and that
we’re all doomed
and that
there will come a day when
all our labor has been
returned
to
dust
and I know the sun
will swallow the only earth
we’ll ever have
and
I’m in love with you.

From The Fault in Our Stars by John Green (Dutton Books, 2012). Submitted by Megan.

A piece of tree bark

Half way through the night,
as recurring twinges of cramp keep me
padding off to the
bathroom.
I experience a quite
irrational fear of
being in the same room as a piece of
tree-bark.

Taken from Pole to Pole: with Michael Palin, first published in 1992. Submitted by Lauren.

Plowing at high knottage

Plowing at high knottage
through time itself
kinetic
even in stasis

Plowing temporally ahead

With time coming off him
like water in sprays and wakes.

From endnote 57 in David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, (Little, Brown and Company, 1996). First published on Zach Higgins Is A Designer. By Zach Higgins.

Soon enough came fearfulness

Once she was born
I was never not afraid:

afraid of swimming pools,
high-tension wires,
lye under the sink,
aspirin in the medicine cabinet…

rattlesnakes, riptides, landslides,
strangers who appeared at the door,
unexplained fevers, elevators without
operators and empty hotel corridors.

London Review of Books quoting Joan Didion’s Blue Nights. Submitted by Rishi Dastidar.

Beneath Us

For it is brought home to you, at least
while you are watching, that it is only
because miners sweat their guts out that
superior persons can remain superior.
You and I and the editor of the Times
Literary Sup., and the Nancy poets
and the Archbishop of Canterbury
and Comerade X, author of Marxism
for Infants–all of us really owe the
comparative decency of our lives
to poor drudges underground, blackened
to the eyes, with their throats full
of coal dust, driving their shovels forward
with arms and belly muscles of steel.

From George Orwell’s ‘The Road to Wigan Pier’ (1937) as cited on Fors Clavigera. By Marika Rose.

Full of dead men’s bones

All your talk
about freedom and democracy
is sheer claptrap,
parrot phrases,
fashionable twaddle,
or hypocrisy.
It is just a painted signboard.

And you yourselves are
whited sepulchres. You
are mean-spirited boors,
and your education, culture,
and enlightenment are
only a species of
thoroughgoing prostitution.

A quotation from Lenin’s Collected Works, found at Stalin’s Moustache. By Marika Rose.