Weather Or Not

[Fire Monkey]

Weather Or Not

It's crying outside, the sky falling down,
The world is protesting the day
Filibustering Ox-Walks and shoes pounding table tops
And anything to cause a delay

The clouds are all lazy, they lay on the ground,
Their thickness and damp in the way
With dimly lit whiteness and bone chilling frightness
It leaves me with nothing to say

The midnight is dark and as hot as an oven,
I'm thinking I could use some rain
From soggy to socked in to baking you can't win
It just starts all over again.

---

Copyright March 6, 2014 by Timothy Emil Birch

[Brigid Briton]

Hey Tim, It's so good to see you back here, posting a poem! Yeah, I guess the weather tends to be a universal topic of interest (or disgust, depending on how you look at it) and I could identify with this completely.

I like your sporty blue font color too.

This one made me smile in commiseration.

[Fire Monkey]

Thanks, I was feeling a bit fed up with the weather this morning so I sat down and wrote this - actually, I wrote the first two lines while walking back from Deb's and quickly jotted them down when I got home and then expanded on them. I thought a nice colour was in order so I used cerulean blue [well, actually there are 6 different colours called that so I picked one I liked] because I have always felt it was a good sky colour. I'm glad you liked it. It feels good to be doing some poetry again - lately I have been doing more music than poetry, which is fine, but I like to play with words more.

[Cory Raymond]

Hi Fire Monkey,

I liked this a lot too. Seems that we humans think it's either too cold, too hot, too rainy, too dry. It could be worse, we might live on Mars or something!

I must confess that I don't know what filabustering ox-walks means. Care to enlighten me?

I like your poetic style. I hope that you will continue to "play around with words".  Cory

[Fire Monkey]

Happy to enlighten when I can

I chose 3 forms of delaying used in politics in different places, all of which tend to be rather childish, filibustering is when a politician delays a vote by starting to talk and just keeps talk and talking and talking about nothing in particular. This is a popular way in the USA for a vote in congress to be delayed since by the rules any representative has the right to speak before the vote but it doesn't limit the content of what they might say so as long as they remain standing and do not stop talking then the vote can not be taken. Ox-walk is a Japanese equivalent. In the Japanese government votes are done by ballot rather than raised hands so an Ox Walk is were a person walks as slowly as humanly possible - as long as their body continues to move they are counted as being in the process of casting their ballot and nobody else can start to cast a ballot until they are done. It is my understanding that one US Senator filibustered for just over 24 hours to delay the passing of a bill and in Japan one politician took 14 hours to walk from the back of the room to the front to cast his ballot - so both seemed to be great images of delaying tactics. The shoes of course refer to a popular UN tactic of representatives banging their desks with their shoes so that the person speaking can't be heard. Isn't it nice to know that the control of the world is in such mature hands?

[Cory Raymond]

Hi Fire Monkey,

Thanks for the explanation. I am very familiar with the filibuster, being an American (who's disgusted with the political process) but I hadn't heard of the Ox-walk. It's just as crazy and immature as what we do in this country. I'm wondering, do real oxen walk really slow? (I'm thinking some politicians, at least in the U.S. behave more like mules than oxen!) But, oh, I just remembered that mules tend to be pretty smart...

[Fire Monkey]

I think most politicians are, like mules, actually smart but just so stubborn about things that they act as if they have no brains at all. I have followed politics from all over the world and so far I have not been impressed with any of it but since those in power have such an impact on the rest of us I want to know what they do and how they think. I do sometimes see a similarity between politics and weather though

[Daniel Mark Extrom]

Hi Tim (Fire Monkey),

Thank you for posting this.  I had to read it a couple of times to get the rhythm/meter, but I got it.  It's interesting how different people work their rhymes and their rhythms.  I find that I generally, but not always, tend to work around seven syllables; that is, some stanzas will have seven, but sometimes one stanza will have eight, and the next six, or even nine and five, but often it kind of works out this way, even if I'm not conscious of it.  And the trouble for me is that when I read others' poems, I read, at least initially, in the same rhythm as I am used to writing in.  And then I have to go back and clear my  mind and work away from my own pre-existing process.  I wonder if others think the same way. As I recall, Milton's Paradise Lost (which I confess I couldn't get through!) was exactly 10  (or maybe it was exactly 11 or 12-I forget)) syllables in each line that went on for about a million pages. That's either commitment, or someone with OCD so severe that he deserved commitment!

I wonder if you count syllables as you go, or if others do.  I don't do it deliberately, but find, often, that I do it at the end, and while I am not manic about matching syllable counts in each line, or each couple of lines, I sometimes re-work something if the rhythm doesn't seem quite right, and somehow it comes back to thinking in "sevens."

I notice in "Weather or Not" that each end line had eight syllables, and that your opening line in stanza 1 is 10 syllables and stanzas 2 and 3 are each 11, and that the third line in each stanza is the longest (14/12/12). It works well! By the way, I just counted: stanza 1 had 41 syllables, stanza 2 has 39, and stanza 3 has 40!  Interesting how that works out. That adds up to 120 syllables, spread over 12 lines=an average of 10 syllables each line.  Was it intentional? Maybe you are Milton returned!!!

And the political aspect was not-so-subtly apparent, and sadly true. Well done! I like this.

(By the way, if you were not a syllable counter, I hope I don't cause you to become obsessive-compulsive with it!)

Dan

[Fire Monkey]

I think there are many ways that different poets go about writing - in my case it is as if each poem is a song even though there may not be any music in my head [sometimes there is and sometimes there isn't] I get my rhythm for a poem the same place I get the rhythm when I compose music [except I tend to have more success with poetry - most of the music I compose is total failure and it is only that I write a lot that I get a few good ones ] it's like there is a rhythm box in my head that keeps the beat and when I start a poem I just let the words flow to that beat.

So in all, I don't really think much about the syllables or the rhyme - they just happen and it is only when I read something back to myself and it seems wrong that I then stop and check such things to find where the problem lays. But that's just my way and there are many ways to write.

I'm glad you enjoyed the poem - thanks for sharing your thoughts.