Tag: Gabriel Smy

Don’t cry for me Vancouver

This is not us
Born and bred in Vancouver
Remember this, the morning after

Why did you trash my downtown backyard?
Such a beautiful city
Destroyed by such a few

Shame shame, double shame
Where does this anger and hate come from?
A riot in the city of love

We are so much more than this
These are not the fans we need or deserve
I wish we could have been better

When you talk about destruction
You know you can count me out
You will pay, somewhere, somehow

The city belongs to us
The people whose words are on the walls
I am proud to walk around the morning after

And see everybody clean
What a few people destroyed
Love can save us, only love

Vancouver sigue de pie
Te amo hermosa cuidad
Better luck next year boys

A compilation of phrases written spontaneously on window boarding by Vancouverites who were cleaning up after the Stanley cup riot on 15 June 2011. Submitted by Gabriel Smy.

The Sample

I want a specimen of your urine.
I have my own syringe.

I had a suckling brother,
who died at the most tender age.
The beast had a human body,
the feet of a buck, and
a horn on its head.
The corpse will be taken to Tonga.

Because I was out buying a pair of wooden shoes,
I had yams and fish for two days,
and then I ate fern roots.
At what time were these branches
eaten by the rhinoceros?

I don’t play the violin, but I love cheese.

‘Useless phrases drawn from actual phrasebooks by Swedish linguist Mikael Parkvall, from Limits of Language, 2006,’ from Futility Closet. Submitted by Gabriel Smy.

Hamlet R.I.P.

Hamlet was a young man very nervous.
He was always dressed in black because his
uncle had killed his father, shooting him
in his ear. He could not go to the
theatre because his father was dead
so he had the actors come to his house
and play in the front parlor and he learned
them to say the words because he thought he
knew best how to say them. And then he thought
he’d kill the king but he didn’t. Hamlet
liked Ophelia. He thought she was a
very nice girl but didn’t marry her
because she was going to be a nunnery.
Hamlet went to England but he did not
like it very much so he came home. Then
he jumped into Ophelia’s grave and
fought a duel with her brother. Then he died.

From ‘English as She Is Taught: Genuine Answers to Examination Questions in Our Public Schools, 1887,’ as featured on Futility Closet. ‘By’ removed from line 3 and ‘he’ from line 12 to keep the decasyllabic pattern. Submitted by Gabriel Smy.

Growth of a Poet’s Mind

We had hurried to the shelter of the alders
alongside the river Derwent, as dark clouds
drifted across the sun and a rain squall
swept through the valley. It passed in minutes,
soon followed by shafts of sunlight that pierced
ever-widening gaps between clouds whose
racing shadows traced the contours of the fellside.

As the wind subsided, the descending scales
of willow warbler song began again
and bumblebees emerged from shelter to feed,
shaking raindrops from the last of the bluebells
and newly opened wood crane’s-bill flowers,
a floral succession that marks the transition
from spring into summer in these woodlands.

Down at our feet a male ghost moth had emerged
from a brown chrysalis half-buried in the soil –
not without struggle judging by the damage
to one of its wings that had still not fully
expanded. It took its first uncertain
steps across wet grass towards the bracken
fronds, where it would remain until nightfall.

Ghost moths are unusual in engaging
in communal courtship displays at dusk,
drawn together in leks by emitting
come-hither scents that are reminiscent
of the aroma of goats. They hover
just above the vegetation, swaying from side
to side as if dangling on the end of a string.

From Country Diary: Blanchland, by Phil Gates in The Guardian. A few words removed for scansion: ‘a’ (line 17); ‘shelter of’ (20); ‘of a dozen of more’ (24); and ‘said to be’ (25). Submitted by Gabriel Smy.

Where Is Thy Sting?

Sweat bee; light, ephemeral, almost fruity,
a tiny spark has singed a single hair
on your arm. Fire ant; sharp, sudden, mildly
alarming, like walking across a shag
carpet and reaching for the light switch.

Bullhorn acacia ant; a rare, piercing,
elevated sort of pain. Someone
has fired a staple into your cheek.

Bald-faced hornet; rich, hearty, slightly crunchy,
getting your hand mashed in a revolving door.
Yellowjacket, hot and smoky, almost
irreverent, imagine W. C. Fields
extinguishing a cigar on your tongue.

Honey bee and European hornet;
a matchhead that flips off and burns on your skin.
Red harvester ant; bold and unrelenting,
somebody is using a drill
to excavate your ingrown toenail.

Paper wasp, caustic and burning. Like
spilling a beaker of hydrochloric
acid on a paper cut. Blinding, fierce,
shockingly electric, a running hair drier
has been dropped into your bubble bath.

Bullet ant; pure, intense, brilliant pain.
Like fire-walking over flaming charcoal
with a three-inch rusty nail in your heel.

From the examples of the Schmidt Sting Pain Index on Wikipedia. A few words removed to aid scansion: ‘Similar to’ (line 10); ‘Like a’ (15); ‘distinctly bitter aftertaste’ (19); ‘Tarantula hawk:’ (21). Punctuation amended. Submitted by Gabriel Smy.

In the Merry Month of May

Arsenal missed
the chance to close the gap on Premier
League leaders—

Arsenal’s rapidly
deteriorating season
took another blow.

Arsenal—could
only earn a point as their Premier League title
aspirations were dented.

Arsenal’s Premier
League title aspirations suffered
a significant setback.

Arsenal kept
up the pressure—and maintained
their title hopes.

Arsenal’s title
hopes were left hanging
by a thread.

Arsenal’s Premier
League title hopes were dealt
another devastating blow—

Arsenal’s Premier
League title challenge is all but over after
they lost to a last minute goal—

Arsenal blew
the Premier League title race
wide open.

Stoke extinguished
Arsenal’s Premier League title dream
with a deserved win at the Britannia stadium.

Lines from the opening paragraphs of Arsenal football match reports on the BBC football website. The reports quoted cover a run of 10 games from Sunderland (home), 5 March, to Stoke (away), 8 May 2011. Ellipses replaced with m-dashes. Submitted by Gabriel Smy.

For Whom The Earth Was Made

What great births you have witnessed! The steam press,
the steamship, the steel ship, the railroad,
the perfected cotton-gin, the telegraph,
the phonograph, the photograph, photo-gravure,
the electrotype, the gaslight, the electric light,
the sewing machine, and the amazing,
infinitely varied and innumerable
products of coal tar, those latest and strangest
marvels of a marvelous age.
And you
have seen even greater births than these;
for you have seen the application
of anesthesia to surgery-practice,
whereby the ancient dominion of pain,
which began with the first created life,
came to an end in this earth forever;
you have seen the slave set free, you have seen
the monarchy banished from France, and reduced
in England to a machine.
Yes, you have seen much —
but tarry yet a while, for the greatest
is yet to come. Wait thirty years, and then
look out over the earth! You shall see
marvels upon marvels added to these
whose nativity you have witnessed;
and conspicuous above them you shall see
their formidable Result — Man at almost
his full stature at last! — and still growing,
visibly growing while you look. In that day,
who that hath a throne, or a gilded privilege
not attainable by his neighbor, let him
procure his slippers and get ready to dance,
for there is going to be music.
Abide,
and see these things! Thirty of us who honor
and love you, offer the opportunity.
We have among us six hundred years,
good and sound, left in the bank of life. Take
thirty of them — the richest birth-day gift
ever offered to poet in this world —
and sit down and wait. Wait till you see that
great figure appear, and catch the far glint
of the sun upon his banner; then you
may depart satisfied, as knowing you
have seen him for whom the earth was made,
and that he will proclaim that human wheat
is worth more than human tares, and proceed
to organize human values on that basis.

From Mark Twain’s letter to Walt Whitman for his 70th birthday, written May 1889. The word ‘indeed’ was removed from line 18 to aid scansion and three more prosaic lines taken out after ‘England to a machine’. Found at Letters of Note. Submitted by Gabriel Smy.