(after William Butler Yeats and James Harbeck)
First Gyre
The falcon circled, then flew off; the falconer was pissed.
Well, what did he expect she’d do, with everything so dis
-combobulated?
Second Gyre
There’s a book I read, predicted this: come
the millenium, and things would fall apart, get discom
-bobulated.
Third Gyre
As you see: just look at this rum job:
A riddling monster, shambling through the sand, has discombob
-ulated the indignant birds.
Fourth Gyre
Brother, it’s a bad job—who
can stand to swim? The bloody tide’s so loose and discombobu
-lated.
Fifth Gyre
While the best lack all conviction, haters hate;
No wonder everything’s so fucking discombobulat
-ed.
Sixth Gyre
It’s been more than twenty centuries our end’s been fated:
And now it seems the whole damned world is discombobulated.
Image: ~Mr. Falcon~ by Mohammed Alnaser, published under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic (CC BY 2.0) license.
The poem, in all its disgrace, was inspired by this post about the word discombobulated on Sesquiotica (three times as good as semiotics) by the redoubtable (twice-doubted) James Harbeck. And, of course, William Butler Yeats, without whom, etc.
My Dad — whose name, for what it’s worth, was and remains Bob — pronounced it discaboobalated.
the poem which turned me from mechanical engineer to rhetorician. long story.
cool pen.
~
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That sounds like a story worth telling! I’d love to hear it.
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You are an amazing poet!
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You are too kind – but thanks! I’m very happy you took the time to read these!
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Hahaha. I am seriously liking your poem.
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Double plus thanks! It started out as a formal exercise after I read Harbeck’s confection, and I started thinking that it would be fun to discombobulate the word itself by making progressive rhymes out of it. At some point it magically turned into Yeats’s Second Coming. (I no longer have any idea how that happened.) Originally I had it as one long poem, but that did not work too well — too repetitive, I think (try it and you’ll see) — so I broke it into its constituent images, and gave each its space. With that, I thought the repetition worked (repetition is kind of tricky…). I had to read it out loud a lot and tweak it considerably to make sure it scanned, or at least could be made to scan. Once I liked it, I let it go. I’m glad you liked it too.
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