Gorgeous! Love the wheat-sack and the vanilla - a horn of plenty.

'brownful' - beautiful. This poem might have been written for me. Was it? Was it?

What is the point of repeatedly posting the work of Robert Rankin? Unless you are Robert Rankin, which it seems you're not. You probably think it's funny or postmodern or clever. It's only one of those three things, and post-modernism is just so old-fashioned these days. Don't you know that post-post-modernism has already given way to proto-neo-millenarianism?

Hi - good to see you again! Like this a lot. 'Cochlea' is a strangely anatomical word to use, it makes me feel almost queasy, and I think that's good - shows just how far those women burrow into us, even though we'd like to pretend they don't. A good tension between that and the last stanza. Nice one.

For once I can agree with Rockmage. It's probably what everyone on this site, in fact everyone everywhere, really wants and you have put it beautifully.

I commented before but never voted - here you go. I think end slightly lets it down, too limpid, too unearned, but the piece reads beautifully. Is the 'orange sun' over the Seine in the second stanza a reference to a Monet painting - is that the connection?

Stanza 6 is great - I love a judiciously used pun. I think the last stanza also sums the whole up very poignantly. I'm afraid I don't know what an EKG is, so I'm not sure if I entirely get stanza 2, though the meaning is clear, but generally I think this is one of the best things I've read on this site.

Hey, I still like cochlea. This seems a little less sensuous than it did before - I'm not sure what other changes have been made - but it seems to me smoother and less memorable. I wouldn't have changed it. But you can't please all the people all the time...

I agree, this is too long and repetitious and inventing a word like 'diers' to enforce a rhyme just isn't on. 'I'm a headache in the head/Of an infantile cupid' is tautologous - where else would the Cupid have a headache? Really, this has no focus but misery.

I like this, it's wry. I think the apsotrophe should move - "Death's" - unless you do mean deaths in the plural. But hey, it's small thing, and the title is very good.

"As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods; they kill us for their sport". A nice reversal of Shakespeare, though I think he said it better.

1. I take it then that you don't particularly care for the entire history of English language poetry.
2. If you can't see how what you've written stands in inverse relation to that line from King Lear, whether intentional or not (it doesn't matter), then I despair.

It's a funny poem, but metrically it ain't no limerick.

Believe me, it's over. Get over it, 'Meadows of owes?'

No smoothing! I like this with its internal rhymes, the tripping rhythm, the abrupt caesurae. Stops you getting too comfortable, just like the barmaid.

Lovely and rueful, but the second line I don't really understand - is it the wind making the elm trace the love making name on the wall?

There a plenty of things I don't understand here - I'm being very stupid today, blame it on jet lag as I've just flown back from New York. For one, the title is meaningless to me; secondly, I have no idea what you mean about your trip to the store being handbasketed. However, I love the first stanza and the conversational tone of this.

Your argument didn't really get you anywhere did it? Neither did your poem. This is a tiresome subject tiresomely recounted.

I fully expect to hear this lyric attached to a Miley Cyrus song soon. I don't mean this as a compliment.

A lovely stare? Lovely forced rhyme, more like it.