Doing your duty!

I’m a patriotic husband,
you my patriotic wife,
lemme book into ya camp
and manufacture life.

Only financially secure adults
in stable, committed, long-term
relationships should participate.



A song encouraging Singaporeans to have more babies, reported in Baby Love, The Economist, 25 July 2015. Submitted by Rishi Dastidar.

Monkey Brand is perfect for

Spotless Earthenware
Smiling Housewives

Clean Baths
Happy Husbands

White Marble
Contented Servants

Shining Pots and Pans
In The Parlour

Polished Stair-Rods
In The Kitchen

Bright Fire-Irons
In The Factory

Sparkling Glass-Ware
Simple!! Rapid!!
Clean!! Cheap!!





From an ad in a biography of William Lever: The King of Sunlight by Adam McQueen (Bantam Press, 2004). Submitted by Rishi Dastidar.

A relationship with the vernacular

Let us also recognize
our own native
detachable snake-hips,
our rangy legs,

our educated feet.
Our arms and fingers
wave and snap
in a special way.
Our shoulders hang
as no other people’s
shoulders hang.



Taken from 'Musical Myths of the American West', by Stephen Brown, a review of two books in the Times Literary Supplement, 9 November 2012. The poem is a quotation from the writings of Lincoln Kirstein. Submitted by Rishi Dastidar.

A day without deference

Let the nation’s doormen do their jobs without smiling
Let waiters at suburban restaurants leave their flair at home
Let the janitors at Princeton mop no vomit from the dormitory stairwells
Let retail greeters of every description call in sick
Let the first-class passengers board at someone else’s leisure
Let the nation’s limo drivers require their passengers to open their own damn doors
Let the production interns at CNBC send the on-air “talent” to fetch the coffee
And, for just one day, let the talent ask their interviewees hard questions



From the essay Servile Disobedience by Thomas Frank, February 2011. Submitted by Rishi Dastidar.

Drunkorexia

“Eatin’s Cheatin’” echoes around the office on a Friday afternoon.
Women pick over their naked salads and extra extra light low fat
Philly on Ryvita. The preparations for ‘Rosé o’clock’ are well
under way.
They’ll grumble through the afternoon and suppress the urge
to be
‘naughty’ whenever anyone offers a biscuit, sweet or chocolate.
Fun.



From Drunkorexia: A stupid name, but a serious problem on the Independent blogs. Omitted words: 'as' (line 1) and 'their way' (4). Submitted by Rishi Dastidar.

Purge the entire board

Testosterone-fuelled silverbacks
eat what they kill
in under-supervised dealing rooms,
skimming fortunes
from everyone else's endeavour.
So far the remedies are
cough drops for cancer.



Taken from Polly Toynbee's Guardian column, Fri 6 July 2012. Submitted by Rishi Dastidar.

Live your dash

On your tombstone
you’ve got your birth date

and the day of your decease —
and you’ve got your dash.

Live your dash.
Hold still and watch the birds.

Like the hummingbirds —
why are there so many of them?



Taken from the London Evening Standard's review of Werner Herzog's Into the Abyss, 30th March 2012. A comma has been removed after 'tombstone'. Submitted by Rishi Dastidar.

Communiqué from an absent future

We work and we borrow
in order to work and to borrow.

And the jobs we work toward
are the jobs we already have.



Lines from the we want everything blog – critical theory and content from the nascent California student occupation movement. Submitted by Rishi Dastidar.

The Great Money Engine of State

(after Macaulay)

All who could help or hurt at Court,
ministers, mistresses, priests, were
kept in good humour by presents
of shawls and silks, birds’ nests and
attar of roses, bulses of diamonds,
bags of guineas.



Lord Macaulay, as quoted in an article in the Economist about the East India Company, 17th December 2011. Submitted by Rishi Dastidar.

Soon enough came fearfulness

Once she was born
I was never not afraid:

afraid of swimming pools,
high-tension wires,
lye under the sink,
aspirin in the medicine cabinet…

rattlesnakes, riptides, landslides,
strangers who appeared at the door,
unexplained fevers, elevators without
operators and empty hotel corridors.



A paragraph in Joan Didion's Blue Nights, as quoted in the London Review of Books, 3rd November 2011. Submitted by Rishi Dastidar.

On the accidental death of Frank O'Hara

Dear Ketchuplover,

well, these freaky things happen.
Poets have had more
ridiculous deaths than that.

We urge you not to blame anyone.
We are sure Mr. O'Hara was
humongously drunk on that evening.

But it was definitely a big loss.



From a comment by user revistamododeusar on the YouTube video of Frank O'Hara reading one of his poems. Submitted by Rishi Dastidar.

The devil in its sights

It is, frankly, an amazing story.
The indomitable patriarch who will shortly
be forced to plead age and infirmity;

his headstrong son whose eagerness
to do what his father would have done
will shortly doom him;

the loyalists who will unquestionably fall
on their swords; an upending of the moral
landscape in which the miscreants once

happily functioned; and the virtuous newspaper,
perhaps the last great newspaper,
with a last great editor, who, long waiting

for and never believing it would get
such an opportunity, now has
the devil in its sights.



From Will the Guardian Bring Down Rupert Murdoch by Michael Wolff in Adweek. Submitted by Rishi Dastidar.

The summers of his youth

In Algiers, you don’t talk about ‘going swimming’
but ‘knocking off for a swim’.

I won’t insist.

People swim in the harbour
and then go rest on the buoys.

When you pass a buoy
where a pretty girl is sitting,

you shout to your friends,
‘I tell you it’s a seagull’.

These are healthy pleasures.
They certainly seem ideal to the young men.



A quote from Albert Camus found in this essay. Submitted by Rishi Dastidar.

What did you talk about?

Early ambitions to work in the arts,
old cinemas, theatres and pubs,
home ownership,
Eddie Izzard’s theory on cat psychology;

Cubism, Aperol, synaesthesia,
the size of Yorkshire, Venice,
Harry Potter, Peggy Guggenheim,
marathon training, Glasgow, siblings,
sleeper trains, bleak landscapes,
the attentiveness of the staff,

plus sailing stories, basking sharks
and how ‘Jaws’ has traumatised
us both for life.

We had a lot in common.




Taken from a Guardian interview with a couple who had been on a blind date, 8th January 2010. Submitted by Rishi Dastidar.

The morning question

The morning question,
What good shall I do this day?

Rise, wash, and address
Powerful Goodness;
contrive day's business,
and take the resolution of the day;
prosecute the present study;
and breakfast.

Work.

Read, or overlook my
accounts, and dine.

Work.

Put things in their places,
supper, music or diversion,
or conversation;
examination of the day.

Evening question,
What good have I done today?

Sleep.



Benjamin Franklin’s daily schedule, from his autobiography which was written between 1771 and 1790. Submitted By Rishi Dastidar

First Night

If you and I meet up
and have a fabulous evening,
I will try and match you,
for the rest of our relationship,
with my image of
that fabulous evening.

But you are all sorts of other things.
And when I find that I then
can’t match up the magic
of that fabulous bubbly first night
to our second night I become
depressed and disgruntled

and I start hating you.



By Rishi Dastidar, taken from an interview with Rupert Everett in the Metro, 15th June 2010.