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Image is Substance

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There is nothing magnificent or mysterious in this house

You need feel no awe, no hesitation.

Waitrose and daytime TV

have rotted our souls,

the world's pulse is not felt here.

But the chairs salute us,

frozen palace guards,

defenders 'gainst chaos.

 

Not even pot plants.

They are alive,

life is always blemished

and the blemished is banished.

 

Perfect perfect perfect,

everything must be perfect,

so the perfect improvements

on the perfect house

must be even more perfectly perfect

than the original bloody perfection.

 

So precarious.

Perfectly precarious.

Puffball perfection.

 

Poof.........

◄ To a friend

Pandora haiku ►

Comments

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Andy N

Wed 19th May 2010 08:21

enjoyed this, Dave.. not sure if i was that keen on the tons off perfects in the third stanza as it may have overstated it but enjoyed the piece still...

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Anthony Emmerson

Wed 19th May 2010 01:03

Hi Dave,

"Who lives in a house like this?" - not you I hope. Isobel's right - usually the more perfect we make something the more fragile it is. Deftly expressed.

Two other thoughts come to mind - the staggering size and beauty of giant puffballs I saw in my teens. Apparently you can slice them and fry them just like bread (that didn't occur to me at the time - I wish it had.

The other was something I came across recently, and I'm not sure who said it, that "Sainsbury's was invented to keep the riff-raff out of Waitrose." Quite right too.

What? A northerner AND a snob?! Unlikely . . .

Regards,
A.E.

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Isobel

Tue 18th May 2010 23:25

Frustration seems to pulse from this poem. I imagine the walls are magnolia...sounds like hell.
Chaos reigns in my house - wouldn't mind swapping for a while, minus the day time TV though, which I can't abide! Like the ending - it kind of sums up the superficiality of it all...

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