one word cabaret: alert
Casper the friendly
tittered:
his fees were friendly, but
his groom was waiting -
grooming freely,
grooming in bliss,
grooming beyond the mighty,
the able,
the kiss.
tittered:
his fees were friendly, but
his groom was waiting -
grooming freely,
grooming in bliss,
grooming beyond the mighty,
the able,
the kiss.
Labels: fee fi foe
posted by murat11 at 1:44 PM
14 Comments:
There is something in that cascade of lines from the waiting groom grooming beyond the mighty/the able/the kiss that feels inevitable and final; maybe fatal?
Where does the alert come in? Who is alert at a cabaret when grooming in bliss and then finishing up with a langorous kiss. The fee fi foe fum goes unnoticed until the raid is done and all are locked up in the pokey for attending an illegal dance party in Taiwan under martial law or for interracial public displays of affection in China in the 90s.
the kiss....
I like the finality being a kiss
Hello from the National Folk Festival which is at it's last year in Butt, MT!
Miz Lee: Isn't the finality always a kiss? Have fun on the Butte.
Anno: That is an interesting take, that fatality. I certainly didn't feel it in the writing, but these are done with such speed and lack of consciousness. Sometimes I can feel something in the poem that turns one way or another (as in the earlier horse rendering), but this - for me - has an elusive theology.
Teresa: Now, there's some backstory for the Joshua/Teresa romance. Were interracial PDAs truly poke-worthy? I like your rendering of this mess so much, I'm just gonna file it under your responses to those pesky oneworders. Welcome to the dance party.
It wasn't exactly the poem, more the framing -- the alert and the fee fi foe, the reference to a ghost -- that made me wonder just where you were going with it.
Anno: I'm getting there: I notice now that his friendly fees rhyme with fee fi foe, and maybe there's a more sinister archetypal Casper, other than that goofy lovebunny of yore. I know one of the Magi was CaspAr, but he always struck me as a cool dude.
Anno: Got it, this time around. Nicely done, nicely caught, you.
Yesterday I spent most of the day cooling my heels at a branch of our government's immigration service waiting with my client for his interview. As the other regulars among the interpreters there and i were chatting, one interpreter from China was telling us how she had been arrested in the early 90s for walking down the street in Guangzhou holding hands with her Caucasian boyfriend. She was taken in under suspicion of prostitution until her boyfriend paid quite a bit to get her out the following morning. She said that a number of her bilingual friends also had Caucasian boyfriends, and it was a regular police tactic to increase their "bonuses".
In Taiwan, until 1989 when martial law was lifted, dancing was illegal except for at private parties on Christmas Eve.
Teresa: Ah, those intrepid, bonus-plying police! Why the dispensation on Christmas Eve? That's a lot of boogieing and/or foxtrotting to make up for a whole year. Not to mention the cotton-eyed joe.
I thought I answered about the dispensation on Christmas Eve, but I guess it got lost in cyber-space. I heard two explanations: 1) that it was a Western holiday and could be celebrated by Western traditions like dancing; 2) it was the eve of Constitution Day, and everyone needed to celebrate their freedoms.
Teresa: I suspect it has more to do with carbonated drinks and frozen dairy products.
Most Chinese are lactose intolerant, so I suspect there are very few followers of the cult of the hard-core BB in Taiwan. Possibly it had to do with overindulgence in carbonated and fermented fruit of the grape...
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