Making Words Work for You

Twitter Sonnet #61

Drinking water's dismally transparent.
Normal substance is often a letdown.
Gilt masks to legends are heirs apparent.
Garbo haunts a deserted fashion town.
Let's see if I can walk with this much mead.
My balance remains irrepressible.
I have fewer tomatoes than I need.
My tea kettle's almost combustible.
Suddenly everything smells like garlic.
A fucking pinball game for vampires.
My cigars smoked by a Eli Wallach.
The next deal for stagnation transpires.
I do love you, unspecified reader.
Surely that must make you feel much better.

I've been chopping up bits of garlic for my spaghetti almost every night and I've noticed my fingers are starting to get a permanent garlic smell. I'm one of those people, too, who washes his hands after he does something even remotely dirty, so that stuff really sticks.

A while ago, I decided "ire"s in words like "vampires" and "transpires" counted as two syllables--I figured it was inarguable that "dryer", "higher", and "flyer" had two syllables, and had the same sound as words like "fire", "wire", and "hire". You hear "I-ur".

But then last night I was reading Shakespeare's sonnets, which I actually do more than you might expect, and I noticed the first line of the first sonnet, "From fairest creatures we desire increase" counts that "ire" in "desire" as one syllable. Which has given me some consternation. The only thing I can think of is that maybe it was pronounced more like "des-ur" in Shakespeare's day, which is entirely possible, from what little I know of English from the time.

Making sure Eli Wallach's name is pronounced like I think it is, I came across this video;



Looks like his wife's got a pretty good sense of humour.

It's weird how he's the only lead from The Misfits still alive.

You know, I've been thinking I was too hard on Lady Gaga yesterday. A song doesn't need complicated lyrics to be good--I was in a bad mood yesterday. And, hey, she's doing her part to make young people more comfortable with sexuality, sort of. I like how she wears masks all the time. Which reminds me, why isn't there more porn with the female members of Batman's rogues gallery? Someone needs to get on that.

Anyway, I still say Gaga's not as daring as Josephine Baker.