"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.