Bikinis in Bali

"If a country such as Indonesia wants to ban kissing in public and bikinis on the beach, maybe this is a country where Australians shouldn't be". The spoken words I heard as I cruised local TV channels for early morning news.

As I laboured to make the perfect cup of Earl Grey, I wondered why Australians need to use "cultural blackmail" for a bit of fun in the sun and a dip in the sea.

Australia's coastline is longer than 25,000km, add more than 7,000 beaches, pick among spectacular secluded bays framed by rocky crags and colored sands, or choose Manly Beach in Sydney, on Surfers Paradise's Main Beach the party never stops.

On the Queensland Sunshine Coast, those who feel incarcerated by a bikini strip, can stroll naked along the sea-shore of a nudist beach. Rarely is kissing seen on Australian public venues or along the streets.

A western brand of liberal conventions in Indonesia may provoke reprisal, not a joke but a spatter of perversion, to extort the forfeiting of local mores from a hard-up neighbour, inviting trade of long established modesty is immoral, dangling the much-needed but scornful tourist dollar...

Perhaps the key is language, some people "travel" to far away places eager to discover, to appreciate, to see, feel, touch, smell, taste, learn how others breethe, many more are "holiday-makers"... Drinking, drugging, kissing, disrobing on a foreign beach...

Unleashed

I can't control this venomous mood, Roland's male-chauvinistic arrogance makes me angry, it sparks in me a feuding attitude.

The way he treats Rosita, akin to a worthless slave forced into obedience school. If she makes an independent move, he suffocates her by tightening the emotional noose. What is he trying to prove?

I can't deter my own vexation, his constant brain-washing methods are offensive, his expert juggle back in time when peasant-minded-men ruled supreme, and women had no rights.

She is his vassal, a pawn, a puppet, the slave who four millennium ago carried granite blocks to build the pyramid of Cheops.

When he wants something he's rarely nice, and when he has had his want, he will dismiss her as if she were at his paid command. What gives him the right?

To ensure his undisputed rule, he his never satisfied; ten, twenty, a hundred times each day, when not whingeing from his sofa-throne, he spews instructions in royal-highness tones:

" Feed the dog, answer the telephone, did you write that cheque; the garden is dry, pick up the mail, take the rubbish out; make me a cup of tea, what food is there to eat?" And when the food arrives, do you think he is pleased?"

She washes, irons, sweeps and never wavers, while his only chore is to unfold the daily newspaper; though he does not cook he dictates how food is placed on the refrigerator shelves, and must oversee how much carpet-cleanser she will need to clean the rug beneath his feet...

Why does she agree?

That is what I see... Perhaps for Rosita and her chosen Master there is a role-reversal beteeen the sheets...

© 2006 Dallas Mariner

Canti

She will belong to no one, says my woman. Will be mine only, notwithstanding Jove's temptations, she promises, but what a woman tells her lover can be written in the wind, or rapid running water.
Catullo

I love and I hate! Perhaps you ask: How can that be? I don't know, but that's the way it is. And it torments me
Catullo

A Dash of Angostura

If we were to ask: How do you like your Scotch? We would get a variety of answers, such as: straight up, neat, on the rocks, with soda, even double with a pretty lass... I prefer mine with water and a dash of Angostura. But if I were asked: How do you like your poetry? I would have to admit my ignorance and look up the meaning of poetry in the Encyclopedia Britannica. Which I did!

The results were: Concrete poetry, Georgian poetry, Gnomic poetry, Heroic poetry, Pattern poetry, as well as Skaldic, Topographical, Jazz (my favorite), Pure, Physical, even a "Fleshy School of Poetry" associated with Dante Gabriele Rossetti, and so named by Scottish writer R.W. Buchanan.

And I thought poetry was made of: Images, Discourse, Fixed or Free Rhythm, Stressed/Unstressed syllables etc; of metrical distinction, is Pulitzer Prize winner W. D. Snodgrass's example of the first two lines of his poem "April Inventory":

The green catalpa tree has turned
All white; the cherry blooms once more.
In one whole year I haven't learned
A blessed thing they pay you for.

Ok, I got through my lesson of: line breaks, enjambments, end stops, figures of speech, similes and metaphors, I understood that the "word music" of "direct rhyme" should not be forced, the rhyming word needs not be there because it rhymes, but because it is the best for the poem's sense as well as sound, as in the example of the above four lines of W.D. Snodgrass's "April Inventory".
The subtle echo of sounds, created by the "Indirect rhyme" is also known as half rhyme or slant rhyme. "Formal structure" poetry includes sonnets, sestinas, and villanelles...

But, admitting total lack of literary discipline, in the informal delivery of my conclusion I will make a note that as I like my Scotch with water and a dash of Angostura, so I like (mine or yours) poetry, straight from the head or heart with a dash of passion.