Give Over!

Why’s a blown kiss
your opening gambit?
It’s not sincere,
I cannot stand it.

Stop it, end it,
don’t go on.
I’ve had enough,
you’ve got me wrong.

Oh, do desist,
I cannot bear it.
You make me ill,
please do spare it.

You know full well
I’m not your slave.
Don’t treat me like that,
I am not brave.

You take advantage,
see my weakness,
test my friendship
by being facetious.

So, I implore you,
do not tease me.
Please grow up
if you wish to please me.

NOTE: Give Over
An English phrase. Means “stop it” or “Leave me alone”
If someone is complaining, making an unnecessary fuss, or bothering you – you would say “Give over”, used in a playful sense – i.e. with friends, kids or pets.
by brit1979 January 19, 2009

Noli Me Tangere (or Keep Your Distance)

Photo by Gustavo Fring on Pexels.com

Hugging him, Embracing her,
Are very clearly now ruled OUT.
No Touching, feeling, gripping, grabbing,
That is a law we must not flout.

A kiss, a cuddle? … Better not,
Intimacy is not allowed;
Feel, pinch, rub are all verboten,
All off-limits – Shout it loud!

So please don’t touch me, don’t come near,
Stay apart, just keep your distance;
Take a powder, keep away,
You cannot come to my assistance.

No high Fives, no shaking hands,
No contact sports, no postman’s knock.
Life is grinding to a halt,
They’ve got us in a strict headlock.

So, if you feel like being contiguous
Remember the two metre rule,
Intimacy’s not now permitted,
It’s just like being back at school.

Courting couples, you have been warned,
Stap your vitals, Cool your ardour,
Or sure as rotten eggs is eggs
You’ll find yourself with a court order.

P ‘raps tactile anaesthesia’s needed
To stem our need to interact,
For touchy-feelies are no more,
Now that is just a matter of fact.

NOTE:  Noli me tangere (‘touch me not’) is the Latin version of a phrase spoken, according to John 20:17, by Jesus to Mary Magdalene when she recognized him after his resurrection. The biblical scene gave birth to a long series of depictions in Christian art from Late Antiquity to the present. Pre-Raphaelite painters of the mid and late 19th Century were particularly fond of this as a subject for their paintings.

A Yard Of Ale

A Yard Of Ale

A yard of ale, that old-time drink,
Keeps us a metre apart;
The distancing solution,
State of the safe-pub art.

And when I want to meet you over
Chips and battered cod,
Let’s use the café garden,
And a social-bubble pod.

We can gather on the beach
A metre-plus between us
A reasonable distance
To keep us heterogeneous.

When at last we can get closer,
Can shake hands and hug and kiss,
We will clutch our sides and laugh
Over these tortions and reminisce. 

Are your dreams like my dreams?

Photo by cottonbro on Pexels.com

 

Are your dreams like my dreams, elusive,
With never a clear-cut start;
Are your dreams like mine, inconclusive,
At the end do they just fall apart?

Are your dreams like my dreams, so vague,
Do they mix up the people you know;
Are your dreams like my dreams, opaque,
Are the sites so unclear where you go?

Are you ever en route to a party,
One where you’re desperate to be,
But one that you never can get to,
A permanent absentee?

Are you anxious to find you way home,
Lost and looking for aid,
Or unable to find a companion,
Delayed, dismayed, and afraid?

For me, dreams are never a pathway
To content, to pleasure and bliss;
They never do end in contentment,
Never that satisfied kiss.

 

A Vision Of Love

Do you remember the first time we met? 
A long time ago but hard to forget. 

Still so alive in my memory, 
The feed to my every reverie. 

Do you remember that first ever kiss, 
When soft lips touched in newfound bliss? 

Raw hearts first bled in ecstasy, 
The thrill of our conjoined energy. 

Do  you remember that first night of obsession
Love fully felt, all fervour, all passion

The need for each other at last fulfilled 
The essence of joy in conjunction distilled. 

All those memories now, facing reality,
Time and circumstance have brought finality. 

The last test awaits, giving pause for decision, 
Oh, let it be you who completes the Vision.

 

 

 

‘Love’s Philosophy’ – Shelley

[  # 92 of My Favourite Short Poems  ]

‘Paola & Francesca’ by John Dicksee

Love’s Philosophy  . . .  By Percy Bysshe Shelley

 

The fountains mingle with the river 

   And the rivers with the ocean, 

The winds of heaven mix for ever 

   With a sweet emotion; 

Nothing in the world is single; 

   All things by a law divine 

In one spirit meet and mingle. 

   Why not I with thine?— 

See the mountains kiss high heaven 

   And the waves clasp one another; 

No sister-flower would be forgiven 

   If it disdained its brother; 

And the sunlight clasps the earth 

   And the moonbeams kiss the sea: 

What is all this sweet work worth 

   If thou kiss not me? 

 

‘Syntax’ by Carol Ann Duffy

[  # 81 of My Favourite Short Poems  ]

Carol Ann Duffy (1955- )

‘It is not always easy to speak of love.  The words we use to do so are often tortured and can be made incomprehensible by passion and heedlessness.  So, how then do we speak of love?  How does the poet speak of love?  Is the language of love pre-ordained?  Should it run to a formula?  The formula, perhaps, of formal English speech – syntax in other words?  The expression of love surely by-passes such strict rules, and resides in the lips, the eyes, the heart.

In short, simple precisely to-the-point words, Carol Anne Duffy, Britain’s current Poet Laureate, in this poem, unlike any other love poem I have ever read, conveys the thoughts, desires, hesitations which beset us in the search for a meaningful form of capturing such feelings.’

Syntax

I want to call you thou, the sound
of the shape of the start
of a kiss  –   like this, thou  –
and to say, after, I love,
thou, I love, thou I love, not
I love you.

Because I so do  –
as we say now  –   I want to say
thee, I adore, I adore thee,
and to know in my lips
the syntax of love resides,
and to gaze In thine eyes.

Love’s language starts, stops, starts;
the right words flowing or clotting in the heart.

Re-printed from ‘The Times’,  Saturday September 3^rd, 2005
First published in ‘Rapture’, Duffy’s volume of love poems, first published in 2005. 

Here is a spoken version of the poem “Syntax” by Carol Ann Duffy (read by Tom O’Bedlam) . . .

 

‘Let Sleeping Princesses Lie’

A headline from a recent edition of the ‘Daily Mail’ read:

‘Mother demands her son’s school take ‘Sleeping Beauty’ off the curriculum because the princess doesn’t give consent to be kissed and woken up by a prince.’

Let sleeping Princesses lie . . .  The story must be told . . .

---

 

One of our favourite fairy tales
Has fallen under a cloud;
For kissing a soundly sleeping beauty
They say should not be allowed.

Apparently a passing prince
Came upon a lass,
Innocently fast asleep,
And then he made a pass.

Engulfed by a kindly urge
This gallant lad lent down.
He gently kissed her soft pink lips
To take away her frown.

Startled then she leapt right up
And slapped his beaming face.
The Prince soon knew he’d done her wrong
And now was in disgrace.

“How dare you touch me without consent?”
She yelled at him in ire,
“My dignity, my personal space,
Penance they require.

You’d better find a lawyer soon,
That’s what I advise.
Your nasty criminal behaviour
I thoroughly despise.”

And thus the fairy tale did end,
So let this be a lesson.
Even a naive act of love
Can now be thought aggression.

 

 

PLEASE NOTE:   Although it is not usually my habit to post over the weekend, do look out for a new blog from my pen each day of the coming Christmas period. 

Edna St. Vincent Millay – ‘“What lips my lips have kissed’

(No.60 of my favourite short poems)

This Sonnet is by Edna St. Vincent Millay, an American poet and playwright who was born in Rockland, Maine, in 1892.  I find it a moving and poignant poem looking back on her more youthful days with regret and intense longing.  Her sonnet is written in the Italian form, divided into two parts – an eight-lined octet, followed by a six-line sestet, here presented as just two sentences.  It is both reflective and filled with remorse.

Millay’s first published poem, ‘Renascence‘ was particularly well received and launched her on her writing career.  For a large part of her life Millay lived and worked among her Bohemian friends in New York’s Greenwich Village milieu.  Known to her friends as Vincent, she was openly bisexual, and gradually accrued both fame and some notoriety.   In 1923, she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for ‘The Ballad of the Harp-Weaver’.   Edna St Vincent Millay died in 1950.

 

“What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why”

By Edna St. Vincent Millay

 

What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why,

I have forgotten, and what arms have lain

Under my head till morning; but the rain

Is full of ghosts tonight, that tap and sigh

Upon the glass and listen for reply,

And in my heart there stirs a quiet pain

For unremembered lads that not again

Will turn to me at midnight with a cry.

 

Thus in the winter stands the lonely tree,

Nor knows what birds have vanished one by one,

Yet knows its boughs more silent than before:

I cannot say what loves have come and gone,

I only know that summer sang in me

A little while, that in me sings no more.

 

 

Ogden Nash – The Sunset Years of Samuel Shy

 (Poem No.49 of my favourite short poems)

The Sunset Years of Samuel Shy

Master I may be,
But not of my fate.
Now come the kisses, too many too late.
Tell me, O Parcae,
For fain would I know,
Where were these kisses three decades ago?
Girls there were plenty,
Mint julep girls, beer girls,
Gay younger married and headstrong career girls,
The girls of my friends
And the wives of my friends,
Some smugly settled and some at loose ends,
Sad girls, serene girls,
Girls breathless and turbulent,
Debs cosmopolitan, matrons suburbulent,
All of them amiable
All of them cordial,
Innocent rousers of instincts primordial,
But even though health and wealth
Hadn’t yet missed me,
None of them,
Not even Jenny, once kissed me.

These very same girls
Who with me have grown older
Now freely relax with a head on my shoulder,
And now come the kisses,
A flood in full spate,
The meaningless kisses, too many too late.
They kiss me hello,
Should I offer a light, there’s a kiss for reply.
They kiss me at weddings,
They kiss me at wakes,
The drop of a hat is less than it takes.
They kiss me at cocktails,
They kiss me at bridge,
It’s all automatic, like slapping a midge.
The sound of their kisses
Is loud in my ears
Like the locusts that swarm every seventeen years.

I’m arthritic, dyspeptic,
Potentially ulcery,
And weary of kisses by custom compulsory.
Should my dear ones commit me as senile demential,
It’s from kisses perfunctory, inconsequential.
Answer, O Parcae,
For fain would I know,
Where were these kisses three decades ago?

By Ogden Nash

NOTES:

Frederic Ogden Nash (1902 – 1971) was an American poet well known for his light verse, of which he wrote over 500 pieces. With his unconventional rhyming schemes, he produced some of the best-known humorous verse. From time to time his poetry can be extremely moving and delicate with a beautiful turn of phrase – as in this particular poem where he writes of  “the meaningless kisses, too many, too late”.

 The Parcae: In ancient Roman religion and myth, these were the female personifications of destiny, often called the FATES in English.

‘Jenny kiss’d Me’  is a poem by the English essayist Leigh Hunt. It was first published in November 1838 by the Monthly Chronicle.   The poem was inspired by Jane Welsh, the wife of Thomas Carlyle. According to anthologist Martin Gardner, “Jenny kiss’d Me” was written during a flu epidemic, and refers to an unexpected visit by the recovered Hunt to the Carlyle household and being greeted by Jenny.

N.B.  I posted Leigh Hunt’s poem ‘Jenny Kissed me’  on  February 3rd, 2017.  Click this link to read it …  ‘Jenny Kissed Me’