Let's All Write Bouts-rimés: Poem the First- The Ardingers

As I said before, Bouts-rimés is a collaborative form in which one gets a series of rhymes from another person and crafts a poem from them.  Alexandre Dumas, père, compiled a whole book from famous poets of the day with the same set of rhymes.  It can be both a delightful and extremely tricky form.

I am finding a natural tendency toward poems for a precocious but dark child.

I sent out the call to my readers for a set of rhymes and found myself crippled by the choices.  I instead have chosen to do all of them.  Here is the first in the series from the set of rhymes sent by my good friends The Ardingers :

The Dissolute's Dirge
by Paul Mathers

My liver I keep in a sog
for my pneuma's in a bit of a bog,
a condition that circumstance fathered,
to ammend it I shan't be bothered.
Existence is best viewed through fog
to keep horrors from filling your log.
Savoir faire one can glean from my story:
Be the amaurotic in the observatory.
For in a world where the dog eats the dog,
I would sooner make camp with the frog
who on trifles and pests will grow fatter
and not give a rip towards the matter.
So exhausting the state of agog.
To the alehouse for a measure of grog!

August was a drag

Something that may not be abundantly clear to readers of this blog is the great mass of cobbled together neuroses which comprise Paul Mathers. 

I was thinking about my hypochondria last night and how it's actually worse to be aware of my own hypochondria because I have one track running that says "I think I'm getting sick" while another plays simultaneously which says "But I always think that.  But is this the time it's for real or am I just doing it again?"  Which is like the magic shell on the scoop of ice cream which is my constant illness panic, a scoop which is in amongst one of those sundaes where you win free t-shirts for your whole family if you can eat it in one sitting. 

In short, I'm a bit of a mess. 

This past month has been a mammoth case of the mulligrubs for me.  I have every intention of resurrecting this September.  I am not seeking to make excuses or elicit sympathy.  Just stating the fact.

Out of the ashes comes the muffled cackle of the phoenix.  I give my solemn pledge as a doctor of divinity to be more consistent in my blog posting.  The good news is that I've crawled out from behind the couch and picked up pen to finally begin composing the long promised Bouts-rimés project of which I took on a Herculean amount.  I shall begin to post them at (hopefully) regular intervals starting immediately after I finish writing this post.

Thank you to the people I am supposing exist for your understanding.  Life does have a way of slipping through one's fingers.  As does love, empires, and mercury.

Some Quick Housekeeping

1) The bouts-rimés poems are coming.  Patience please.  I did no writing over our vacation.  I am self-imposing a deadline of the end of next weekend since I've chosen 5 poems to write.  They are coming.

2) Please do check out Laurie and my new blogging project.  It is barking mad.  We are discussing existence through the filter of watching every episode ever made of Project Runway.  If you like what I do here, you will very likely enjoy it.  You may also enjoy it if you feel otherwise.
http://runawayprojectrunwayproject.blogspot.com/

Fin de Vacances

So it goes. Jiggity jog and so forth.

I feel as if I've turned a corner this week.  More soon.