Just another false alarm...

[Via Crooked Timber and Backword Dave] It's National Poetry Day today. I've been waiting for a while now to have an excuse to link to some part of a long poem called 'Curing Homosexuality' by Jim Everhard. It's not a good poem, but it is very funny, and also moving in a naïve, awkward sort of way. At this point, he's discussing how, according to psychiatrists, "everything you saymeans something else even more sinister than what you meant":

For instance, never say: "I put my umbrella in the closet and found my brother in the backyard beating the shit out of a roosterwhile looking at nude pictures of Judy Garland."

To a psychiatrist this means:

• umbrella = phallic symbol = womb = death = fear that it will rain atyour funeral and no one will come
• closet = phallic symbol = womb = mother castration = desire to work for a fast food chain = prostitution = fear of underwear
• brother = phallic symbol = sibling rivalry = castration = desire tostick your finger up your ass and smell it
• rooster = phallic symbol = cock flying = fear of Karen Black =crashing = fear of impotence = hatred of women = fear of oxygenshit = phallic symbol = fear of dirt = work = puritan work ethic =father's penis = sexual frustration = deviations = fascination withdirt = bad toilet training = sexual hostility toward pilgrims
• nude = phallic symbol = opposite sex = original sin truth = fear ofgardens = self-deception = poor sanitation habits desire fordeath and return to Earth Mother = return to disco = hatredof mother = love of analyst but always waiting for some-one to come along and say no = desire to live in ahole in the ground
• Judy Garland = phallic symbol = fear of tornadoes = love/hate ofsucking = confusion of identity = desire to have oral relations witha lap dog = necrophilia = fear of Easter bonnets = desire tobe a woman = fear of bad breath = spiritual destitution = desire to be Dr. Kinsey = existential mal-function = fear of tubas = fear of dude ranchesand desire to perform unnatural acts withMickey Rooney = fear of short, pimply people

Like a cancer, one sentence can devour your entire psyche.

My addition to the sonnet debate would be arguments in favour of 116, but I could never remember it by heart the way some say they do for other sonnets. I don't make any great artistic claims for the music I like, but if Shakespeare could be put to popular music, then it might linger a bit longer. Of course, he'd have to be translated into the right style, and since all the popular music of our time is country and western, it would have to be something like this...

Don't let me put a bottle in the way
Of fools who think alike. Love just ain't love
Which changes when a man gets old and grey
Or cracks like broken hearts that beer won't soothe:
No sir! it is a Lord-lovin' affair
That twenty hurricanes could not impair;
It is the sev'n-eleven of the night,
Whose worth's untold, although it's price is right.
Love don't groan, though sweet-tongued airs and graces
Made me moan when you'd sleeve all your aces:
Love don't change with the oil in your old truck,
But bears it out even when down on luck.
Shoot me down if I tell word of lie,
And I'll hang down my head and cry-y-y-(oh-lord).