As E@L is wont to do after an evening of imbibing (beers, sake), he sits on the Toto arse-washing toilet seat in his tiny hotel room with a certain type of book (or his Kindle) on his bare lap.
Poetry. And he reads it out loud.
As a young man, a teenager even, E@L did not "get" poetry the way he did as a ten year old - when Sr Mary Brega praised his verses on cats and dogs being "cuddly and wuddly," and awarded them a gold star. No, sad to say, nothing had progressed much, until Year 12, when, not "allowed" to do Chemistry (but begrudgingly permitted to continue Physics), he chose English Literature as his fifth subject. He was told to buy a book by some Metaphysical Poets. John Donne, Andrew Marvell, etc... You know the crowd.
E@L didn't understand a word of the complicated rhyming and obscure references and awkward syntax - more truthfully, he didn't even try - but he passed EngLit somehow, perhaps on the strength of an essay on Crime And Punishment in which Raskolnikov was, he suggested, a precursor to Albert Camus's Stranger: cliches, that was all it took.
There is a short set of Poetic Best Ofs on his Kindle, and this includes some poems of Donne's. So, being in a declaiming mood, needing to blow off yakitori steam, E@L unfolds his Kindle's new book-like protective cover (Y2000 in BIC Camera, Shinjuku) and finds "Elegy 19: To His Mistress Going To Bed" awaiting.
He declaims to the limits of his plastic one-piece toilet/bath cubicle's acoustics:
Whoever LOVES [he over-emphasised], if he do not propose
The right TRUE end of love, he's one that goes
To sea for NOTHing but to make him sick[!!]."
Hang on. Does that mean what E@L thinks it means? That if you are going to start, you should make a concerted effort to finish, when it comes to wooing the ladies? An effort, close associates know, E@L cannot always lay (ho ho) claim to.
Soon enough E@L gets back to declaiming, but now with an ear more open to not only the sing-song sound of the words (he wants to be able to read like Tom Hiddleston), but also the rather rude connotations, the dooble ontondurs, and the copious and amusing naughty bits. This is getting sticky, this poem, he feels. This Donne is quite the rake.
E@L wonders, after 30 lines or so, if he ought not have brought some more traditionally (i.e. modern) risque material into the dunny (ho ho) with him, instead of works by this outrageously crude, famous, hence charming and sophisticated, poet - E@L means, you don't want to read dirty poetry, do you? Or do you? E@L will have to look it up.
Perhaps he feels a bit guilty for finding such stuff in his toilet-based situation, for expecting seriousness and elegance and chuffy ruffled-collared wit whilst taking a dump, rather than enjoying (and he was enjoying it now) 300 year old fun and frankness and nudge-nudge honesty, from back before sex was invented, a guilt he might not have felt with internet access to a local (Japanese - E@L is in Tokyo for a week more) pron site or other, probably involving tentacles, and/or enemas, etc... (You've seen the pics, you know how weird this country gets...)
But when E@L gets to the end of the pome, reading in more hushed tones now in case someone beyond the cardboards walls complains about the metaphysical language, it quickly becomes very un-meta in its physicality:...
Rich Nature in women wisely made
TWO purses, and their mouths aversely laid. [Purses!]
They then which to the LOWER tribute owe, [Uh-huh...]
That way which that exchequer looks must go ; [Huh?]
He which doth NOT, his error is great,
As who by CLYSTER gives the stomach [pause] meat.
So that means, E@L translates prosaically (literally), that if the gent is only going to kiss his lady's upper "purse", he may as well have a clyster (look it up) instead of dinner and expect hearty sustenance...
And that's when E@L realises that he IS reading enema porn.
E@L
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