This is the title of a pome, sent to me by the lovely M who sends me pomes to wake up to most days, and I’ll include it in this post because it is spectacularly attitudinal, and a ripper of a metaphor.
Back again at last in my beloved Snowy Mountains, I woke this morning with a vivid memory of the birthday I celebrated after my first round with cancer. My sons, who were teenagers at the time, broke into their piggy banks and cadged off their dad to buy me a luxurious Yves Saint Laurent bathrobe of thick white towelling with delicate pink and green satin embroidery on the collar and cuffs. I said, unwisely, wow, is this for me to cark in, and nobody but me thought it funny.
My sense of humour was always dark grey and the cancer experience turned it black. The colour black is, of course, the result of the absence of, or the complete absorption of light, depending on your point of view when you wake up in the mornings. I prefer to think of it as the latter because I’m cheered by the notion of darkness needing light for its very existence, rather than being the consequence of light’s total absence.
Anyways, this Yves Saint Laurent bathrobe is the most luxurious item of clothing I have ever owned, and it is still almost as good as it was the day of that first survival birthday. I may yet cark in it. I most certainly will insist on being buried or burned in it. I’m kicking myself that I left it at home, because it would be perfect for running from the hot tub on the freezing verandah back into the glow of the fire-warmed sitting room. I don’t know how those louts of mine even knew about Yves Saint Laurent at that obnoxious stage of their lives, but I’m ever so glad they did.
The pome:
Pluto Shits on the Universe
BY FATIMAH ASGHAR
On February 7, 1979, Pluto crossed over Neptune’s orbit and became the eighth planet from the sun for twenty years. A study in 1988 determined that Pluto’s path of orbit could never be accurately predicted. Labeled as “chaotic,” Pluto was later discredited from planet status in 2006.
Today, I broke your solar system. Oops.
My bad. Your graph said I was supposed
to make a nice little loop around the sun.
Naw.
I chaos like a motherfucker. Ain’t no one can
chart me. All the other planets, they think
I’m annoying. They think I’m an escaped
moon, running free.
Fuck your moon. Fuck your solar system.
Fuck your time. Your year? Your year ain’t
shit but a day to me. I could spend your
whole year turning the winds in my bed. Thinking
about rings and how Jupiter should just pussy
on up and marry me by now. Your day?
That’s an asswipe. A sniffle. Your whole day
is barely the start of my sunset.
My name means hell, bitch. I am hell, bitch. All the cold
you have yet to feel. Chaos like a motherfucker.
And you tried to order me. Called me ninth.
Somewhere in the mess of graphs and math and compass
you tried to make me follow rules. Rules? Fuck your
rules. Neptune, that bitch slow. And I deserve all the sun
I can get, and all the blue-gold sky I want around me.
It is February 7th, 1979 and my skin is more
copper than any sky will ever be. More metal.
Neptune is bitch-sobbing in my rearview,
and I got my running shoes on and all this sky that’s all mine.
Fuck your order. Fuck your time. I realigned the cosmos.
I chaosed all the hell you have yet to feel. Now all your kids
in the classrooms, they confused. All their clocks:
wrong. They don’t even know what the fuck to do.
They gotta memorize new songs and shit. And the other
planets, I fucked their orbits. I shook the sky. Chaos like
a motherfucker.
It is February 7th, 1979. The sky is blue-gold:
the freedom of possibility.
Today, I broke your solar system. Oops. My bad.
ƒ
This pome is infinitely applicable to all kinds of situations. I particularly enjoy the use of “chaos” as a verb. I like to recite the pome to the regiments of cancers and their tired metaphors of war. I say it to a couple of people who shit me to tears. I say it to the goddamn state and all its agents. I say it to everybody who
Somewhere in the mess of graphs and math and compass…
tried to make me follow rules. Rules? Fuck your
rules.
I pass it on to you, dear reader. Go forth and chaos like a motherfucker.
Now there’s an epitaph.
No Place For Sheep 
Welcome back sheep. Impeccable timing. No more following rules. I’m going to chaos things up. Love that pome.
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Any noun can be verbed.
“[Alexander] Haig, in congressional hearings before his confirmatory, paradoxed his auditioners by abnormalling his responds so that verbs were nouned, nouns verbed and adjectives adverbised. He techniqued a new way to vocabulary his thoughts so as to informationally uncertain anybody listening about what he had actually implicationed… .”
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Welcome back, Jennifer.
Funnily enough I was given a Yves Saint Laurent bathrobe many years ago. It’s all white, no satin edges. GO kindly rinses the dinner plates at night but for some mysterious reason, he leaves the fatty, oily water in the sink. I can’t stand it first thing in the morning and put my hand in to let the water out, and in the process dirty the luxurious sleeves of my lovely robe.
It spends a lot of time in the washing machine and out on the line, maybe more than on me.
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Hi Helvi, I guess if you haven’t persuaded GO to let the water out of the sink after all this time, it’s probably not going to happen, so you’re doomed to greasy sleeves.
There is nothing quite like a luxurious bathrobe though.
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I have tried to teach the man, but I don’t like his comeback: rinse them yourself.
Even less so when I’m watching something wonderful like the latest Danish series on SBS, “Legacy”. 🙂
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I’m watching that as well – superb TV from the Danes yet again.
Rinse them yourself? Where are his manners? 🙂
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He sounds like my father – “if you don’t like the way I do it, do it yourself” – justifiable, but a bit curmudgeonly. Just like GO. 🙂
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His mum used to tell me that out of her five sons Gertie was the best washer of dishes.
There you go, my mum used to complain that I were so keen to get over this menial task that I used to take the plates away before people had finished their din-din..
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Stunning ‘pome’ from your friend, Fatimah, Jennifer. It’s inspirational and puts me in mind to break a few rules, too.
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I know, it’s very inspirational!I’m completely in love with it
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It’s my new anthem for work and home. 😎
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Mere doggerel.
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PW, are you around?
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So, Pluto churlishly gripes because folk won’t acknowledge it to be the full planet? Well, if it can’t even orbit properly, how can it be a planet and that’s that.
It is an atmosphere short of the full planet, also.
So there.
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Hey! Je suis Pluto!
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“Rules? Fuck your rules.” Think that’s a good slogan for my Friday work tshirt.
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Today, we are ALL Pluto!
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Well that can only be a good thing:-)
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As a poem there’s a lot to like about this, the use of language and the emphatic rejection of imposed boundaries are particularly brilliant…..
But!
If only the science was a little more accurate it wouldn’t have gotten that little bit on the wrong side of me. Because Pluto’s orbit is sometimes called chaotic, but for quiet well understood reasons and only on the scale of Billions of years. And all the other stuff that probably would’ve vexed the designers of the Antikythera had it been discovered then. Whereas modern science was well across its orbit well before 1979. And that’s what got me thinking and led to another way of approaching the poem using Pluto more as a metaphor….
Pluto can be a metaphor for shit in space that’s so impressively hard to understand that it makes your spirits soar just to think about it…..
About hypervelocity stars, marbles on Mars, or Gliese 436b where they tell me you’d see ice so hot it’d burn you, and Quasars, and Pulsars, and Dark Matter, which turns out to matter…. quite a lot. The numbers are so big as to rival infinity without needing divinity and I’m told it gets huge near the end!
and it really does take a massive dump on the universe!
And I love it all because it’s even more wonderfully amazingly transgressive than Fatimah thought Pluto was, And what’s more, Lawrence Kruass assures me its real!
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You BELEIVE Larwence Krauss !?
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Ahhhhh..THAT Lawence Krauss..
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I not only like, I love your comment, HG
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