Tuesday, February 21, 2012

Big elf on a mayonnaise man



Flee to me, remote elf--Sal a dewan desired;
 Now is a Late-Petal Era.
 We fade: lucid Iris, red Rose of Sharon;
 Goldenrod a silly ram ate.
 Wan olives teem (ah, Satan lives!);
 A star eyes pale Roses.




 Revel, big elf on a mayonnaise man -
 A tinsel baton-dragging nice elf too.
 Lisp, Oh Sibyl, dragging Nola along;
 Niggardly bishops I loot.
 Fleecing niggard notables Nita names,
 I annoy a man of Legible Verse.





 So relapse, ye rats,
 As evil Natasha meets Evil
 On a wet, amaryllis-adorned log.
 Norah's foes' orders (I ridiculed a few) are late, pet.
 Alas, I wonder! Is Edna wed?
 Alas--flee to me, remote elf.



S'kay, you don't need to go hide in the corner, it's called a PALINDROME. Kind of like "Pa's a sap" or "Able was I ere I saw Elba" and things like that. Can't think of any more at the moment. (Oh, thought of one! "Sex at noon taxes" and "I moan, Naomi" can be conflated to read, "'Naomi, sex at noon taxes,' I moan."





I don't know who sits around thinking up such bizarre things, but the imagery in this word wedding-cake is gorgeous: just the idea of a remote elf, sitting pondering the mysteries of the Universe when he should be busy in Santa's workshop making death destroyers, makes me sigh, as do the wan olives that teem (teem? In a stream somewhere, or maybe a giant martini), followed by the nihilistic statement, "Satan lives".
















Elves (elfs?) teem too in this enigmatic miracle of a piece: the big elf on a mayonnaise man, who surely needs to lower his cholesterol, and of course that tinsel baton-dragging nice elf (can you see it? I can't). Certain lines are like self-contained poems: "Lisp, oh Sibyl, dragging Nola along" and (maybe my favorite) "I annoy a man of Legible Verse". I've wanted to do that many times.




I could go on and on, for each line of this amazing edifice is fat and juicy with strangely yummy poetry (the "wet, amaryllis-adorned log"!). Reminds me of drinking guava nectar on the lanai that time we went to Maui. Either this was penned by some evil genius, or an autistic savant who reads everything forwards and backwards at the same time, or Oliver Sacks, or Sheldon Cooper on The Big Bang Theory. I certainly couldn't do it myself. . . being a backward child.






http://members.shaw.ca/margaret_gunning/betterthanlife.htm

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