I'm listening to some Monty Python songs. Some of them are pretty darn catchy. Love "The Galaxy Song"; I remember it from The Meaning of Life when Eric Idle emerged from the refrigerator and led the housewife (Terry Jones) into the night sky.

I've gotta go through more of the music I've dropped into the computer. Burn it then delete it, or just delete it. Looks like there's -- yipe! -- 20 hours.

"Duran Duran hated Culture Club and we hated everyone as much as they loathed us. It was great to read the snipes of Holly Johnson [lead singer of Frankie Goes to Hollywood] about how I was 'a tired old pantomime dame.' Or Pete Burns [of Dead or Alive] saying he was going to 'send me a wreath' on hearing that one of our songs had failed to chart."

-- Boy George
More here.

I've been writing a long poem. I don't know that it's finished but I haven't added anything to it for a few days.

I was working on this beast series, every poem including a beast that seemed more like a tiger than anything else, but could have been something entirely else as I never described it physically, not fully, and, in fact, it could have been some sort of devil spirit. The last one of those was on the day I saw the first Baghdad bombing photo with the huge smoke clouds rising, mushroom-like, from the crushed buildings. One of the elements of the beast series was a trio of heads (yes, something of an allusion to Cerberus, the three-headed dog that guards the gates to the underworld), and the bomb clouds reminded me of heads so they became part of the beast series and maybe ended it.

The long poem is built of one-, two-, three-line stanzas. Elements include flowers, "emptiness," wind, hair, bone, and bits from the Iraq invasion that may not even be recognizable as such, especially as time goes on. Am reading Karen Armstrong's A History of God and some of the things she says about God have made their way into the poem, also in possibly unrecognizable form. The poem begins:

I have an emptiness.
It is part of a larger emptiness.

I enter the emptiness, arms loaded with packages,
some perfumed,
some leaking.

A wind follows me ...

**

I fetched my notebook to copy out the lines above. Rereading the poem I crossed out the poem's heretofore final line and began writing.

I think he wants to play. Usually he starts with a loud EE-AO. Sometimes he starts just by putting a paw on your leg. Either the one paw tapping the calf or both forefeet stretching up to the knee. Picking him up typically results in more EH! EH! and struggling. So it's not that he wants to be picked up. Curiously he doesn't seem to go for treats. His brother, Sutra, will snarf up bits of chicken or fish. Sundance will sniff like he's all interested. But he always leaves it, whatever it is. Not that it goes to waste. Dog gets it. But Sundance does go quiet when I get the chopstick and wiggle it over his nose. Nothing fascinates him like that little stick. I'm trying right now to interest him in a emptied toilet paper roll tied to a bathrobe sash. He's only meowed at me when I've stopped jiggling it to type this. But it's not one of the big thrills, I can see that.

I'm listening to Kronos Quartet, their African music album. I've deleted a couple tracks. Hm. The one that's playing right now? Nix!