Came up with this while reading Dorothy Parker on the flight home from Montgomery AL:
All my wisest friends have told me
If you'd save yourself distress
Keep a close watch on your heart
Be the one who loves the less
Love well, my friend, but not too much
So they tell me that it's best
To lose your head but not completely
Be the one who loves the less
If you keep your feelings penned up
Slightly distant and amused
You're much more likely to end up
With your heart just slightly bruised
This is what my wise friends tell me
Thinking of my happiness
Yet I think just one more time I'll
Be the one who loves to excess
3 comments:
Hmmm, begs a call and response verse structure. I'm hearing Lee Hazelwood and Nancy Sinatra, or Sonny and Cher. And of course a catchy chorus. Will try to come up with something -- summon the muse, not many favors left though I fear.
And how may I ask did Montgomery induce you to visit?
I too have been traveling to far away places: Thailand (look up Pattaya in the encyclopedia of sink hole flesh pots) and Jaipur (look up literary festivals). It does broaden the mind.
Maybe you can help me with one I've just started working on: I read a thing about how everyone's so busy staring at their I-phone we're all at risk of losing our depth perception, and then thought of someone who's terrified to look up, who has a kind of reverse vertigo, for whom the height of the sky is like the depth of the ocean in Freud's "oceanic feeling" or Lou's "Ocean". I've only gotten this far:
I never look up
I just stare at my hand
The sky is as deep
And slippery as quicksand....
Have at it.
My stepmother grew up in Montgomery, by the way, and she and my dad go down there for Christmas. I went down to visit them, and also saw the Hank Williams Museum, the Zelda Fitzgerald House and read some Dorothy Parker. Dad's doing OK for 82, thanks for asking.
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