Rhymes with ee
I'm cleaning out handfuls of old poetry. Some of it worthwhile, much of it drivel, I try to find and save, finish the worthwhile bits.
I've noticed that I'm bad for rhyming words that end in "ee". The hard e sound. And I wonder why, but it's obvious, there are an immense number of easy rhymes for words that end in the ee sound: "He, She, Me, We, See, Free", .... one syllable through many: "integrity, futility, celibacy, ingenuity, aristocracy".
And with the addition of suffixes (ly and y for example) you can make almost any word in the English language rhyme with e.
Look at the musical scale: A B C D E F G - 5 out of seven of the notes rhyme with e.
While it makes for easy, musical rhymes it's a bit lazy, (hard e sound), and combined with my tendency (hard e sound again) to overuse the rhyme-scheme abababab it's ruining my flow...
But poetry, (hard e sound), it's like a hydra, and as I sort through and try to finish old poems new ones spring forth:
Some Doggerel:
Her new suitor suits her better
He's what she asked for to the letter,
(Musical with red hair?)
She can't wait for him to bed her
Only question is is when she asks if he will let her...
Irrelevant, but I'm a fan of the light play and double-entendres, thought to polish and improve it, but it's not the sort to be polished and improved.
Then on the heels of that there comes another, Chalk Circle - "She's drawing a chalk circle, when she's done she salts the line, ..." and this one, this will be great, and there's an epiphany where I'm distracted and begin making notes, finding rhymes, building ideas...checking the online thesaurus, rhyming dictionary, it's a poor cheat, my imagination is better and there is no tool finer, there could be though....I need a rhyme for book, the rhymes online are poor, there's "hook, crook, took, cook", a few others, none to the purpose, the visual thesaurus is no help whatsoever either, what would help...reorganize the sentence, and here I pause, move on, then there flows again a torrent of ideas: "Library --> shelf --> book --> page --> word --> letter"; the scale of ideas, each one an order of magnitude above or below the other, and the thesaurus, it doesn't have this, and now I have 6 words I can find synonyms for - now more brainstorming, the maps, paper maps as there are no computer tools that come close, read - the verb of book, there are words like chapter, paragraph, sentence, and more synonyms, antonyms, rhymes, and the brainstorming continues.
And the original poem, the one I began restoring, it's so far up the page now that I've forgotten it's existence.
What is needed is an associative thesaurus, a flash program that generates associated ideas, maps them for you in different colored bubbles, to click on one will lead you to another, the link above does something similar but not at all, instead generates a list and doesn't order them in space...
Perhaps it's for the best, poetry isn't supposed to be easy. But it'd be nice to finish it all up and move on.
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The murder of slow days
It's murder, this. My temper is short, I've almost entirely run out of patience, the solution, of course, is to leave and I'm resolved, I'm not returning after the vacation, but there's the caution, the memory of hard times too close to forget, the bills aren't yet fully paid, but it will be done one way or the other and I would prefer it be on good terms.
Hot, slow days in the restaurant, customers trickle in, they want to come late, stay later, we're not paid by the hour, there's no incentive to stay until the wee hours, already enough of our lives is stolen, it's trying this "So Happy to see you" game and my patience is wearing thin.
Time passes, each day the same, wake, coffee, bus to work, work, work, home, if I'm lucky the sun's still up, an hour or so on the computer, then to bed. Repeat. If my life were set to music it would be the Vuvuzela theme from the world cup.
The benefits, they haven't kicked in, administrative errors and they're not bringing it up, me either, I'll live.
But in my mind there's always the knowledge that it's the slow murder of innocent days.
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Favorite Bench
It's the favorite bench by virtue of being the closest.
I sit there, book unopened, watching the sun set, brightly reflecting swarms of insects, snatches of conversation as the people pass, cool breeze, make notes in a notebook, it's treasured time as it's at most twice a week I get this, time alone, not on the computer, not at work, it's just me and my bench.
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The Countdown
Every night, before the shift begin there's the countdown. Franco wants to know how many days there are until vacation.
I tell him. "There are X weeks and Y days".
We argue, he's sure I've got it wrong, there have to be less, and he goes to the calendar and double checks. I'm right. I'm not too bad at remedial math.
I tell him, a heads up, a warning, that I have no intent of returning after the vacation. The vacation is the end. I don't know what I'll do, I only know the job is killing me, that I can't be here day and night any more, that the vacation is the vacation and it's also the end, sometimes he agrees, he hates it too and thinks the same, other times he tells me that I'll never leave, that I'm one of them now, that I'll change my mind after the vacation and I think about another winter here, the 13 and 14 hour days without break or day off over Christmas, think about the cultural void of another missed theater season, think about not seeing the children, and it scares the hell out of me...
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