striking syllables into smooth verse

'Pale horse' is borrowed from the King James bible via West Wing...:
' And I looked, and behold a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him '

Rickie Lee Jones is one of my favourite singers, she's a natural and so I find the way she seamlessly and expertly fits clusters of syllables that would be clumsy if sung by you or me, into the bars of the melody. Bit like those guys who sell you coconut milk straight from the coconut, yeah... you know the ones. They hack away the extraneous husk with a machete. Rickie has a phonological-metaphorical machete. Yeah.

I have a small collection of heavy items I use as paper weights and I think I thought one was a key but it's not it's a hook. It's cast iron I think, very pleasingly dense. I think the reason I like trucks/ lorries is similar to why I like paper weighty things; they are substantial, reassuringly chunky. The American-built ones (trucks not paper weights) one sees here in Argentina are particularly appealing because even their aspect is one of funky chunk. Chevrolets and Macks and Fords.

Another of the paper weights, the latest in fact, is a perfect cylinder, I guess it's some kind of washer. If coconut husk was being hacked, its pieces might fall into a perfect cylinder, which might be a kind of funnel, kind of like those things on combine harvesters which are basically funnels and receive the sorted wheat not chaff. Nature has a channelling plan, as I, The Poet Lorry Ate, have pointed out before, in Uniting Bullet. So all that chaff or coconut husk or detail goes somewhere. Nothing is wasted. As someone once said.

'Albatross' is a Rickie Lee Jones song.

'Unbearable levity' - Recognise that? It's yer Milan Kundera innit.

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Good Horsemen


watching a battered truck rumble over the flat planet
is as a heavy key and a perfect cylinder into which
chaos is necessarily vacuumed, making it artistic.

this is rickie lee striking syllables into smooth verse
hammering out the sharp dents, the funnel, the slipstream
unbearable levity, the need for more than a sea swell.

inside the earth we cannot see and so imagine
breathing evil, rasping death, galloping hell;
palm outwards, receive a good signal.

recipe of gliding albatross who knows the way
for the way is the eddy of wind and the warmth
gulf stream above and apart from pale horse.