A Travesty of Poetry

Here is an experiment. Take a poem and then hold as close to the original in terms of the lines, number of syllables, number of stanzas, but change the words and the meanings to create a wholly new poem. In this way you are creating a travesty of the original. By definition a travesty is a grotesque or absurd imitation. However, it's fun and the results can be surprising. Here is an example. The first is a wonderful poem by Philip Larkin entitled Talking in Bed. This is a poem about the irony of closeness, how the closer one get to another (talking in bed) the harder it is to maintain if not truth and kindness - at least not untruth and unkindness. Here's the Larkin:

Talking In Bed
By Philip Larkin

Talking in bed ought to be easiest,
Lying together there goes back so far,
An emblem of two people being honest.

Yet more and more time passes silently.
Outside the wind’s incomplete unrest
Builds and disperses clouds about the sky,

And dark towns heap up on the horizon.
None of this cares for us. Nothing show why
At this unique distance from isolation

It becomes still more difficult to find
Words at once true and kind,
Or not untrue and not unkind.

The travesty now. Here the general outline in terms of lines, stanzas, and general grammatical phrase structure has been adhered to. The content is different. Big Frank is writing about the pain of maintaining truth with the world. The connection is internally constructed, but externally validated, and has no absolute. On the other hand - external reality is what it is.

Keeping Your Head
By Big Frank Dickinson

Keeping your head is fraught with pain,
Holding together there reaches only so far,
A measure of one person being true.

Still more and more people choose convenience.
The architecture belies a calculated balance
That says absolutely nothing about you,

The skyscape captures the beauty of posture.
Each has an enduring true connection to all others.
Every variation and change is as true as the next,

Inside it becomes much more difficult to find
Connections both agreeably true
And truly agreeable.

Appropriateness

Big Frank has been thinking (yeah, I know - look out!). We bundles of isolated awareness trudge through life with asperations of connections. The appropriate thing is to be connected, but there are so many choices to make. Among the situations we encounter there come times when it is expected that a connection should be made. So we have in the great U. S. of A. certain agreed upon responses, and we even have a business to lay it all out. Hence the next poem - Big Frank's first in quite some time:

The Appropriate Thing

Sympathetic shoppers
Carrying tunes in the heart,
Seek harmonious cards
That hit just the right mark.

Occasions in categories,
Planted orderly in aisles;
Each an attempt
To hit the right style.

Birthdays are joyful;
Setbacks a pain.
New babies delightful;
And sickness will wane.

“I know what you’re feeling;
This card is our link.”
There may be more to it
But such we won’t think.

To go there will take us
Outside of this store,
To fields full of weeds;
Uncultivated spore.