Deep, deep, deep down, under the throne
Of Omar Khayyam, an Ishmaeili lived.
Despite the promises of bread and wine,
Despite the allure of Rumi, top man,
Fitzgerald lived.
Dear son of the Romans and the Normans,
The Ishmaeli cursed the Wahabi tendency
To frack, frack, and frack again – to transform
The Norman beauty into the Roman thing.
Dear Omar Fitzgerald said that up from the gate,
On the throne of Saturn sate, a neoplatonist
Called Plotinus, a man more familiar with a gate than agate.
Dear Lapis Lazuli, a gem accustomed to an Arabian twist,
Struck a deal with death, in a kind of a Patagonian tryst.
Gerald the bastard, in a kind of Ulster way,
Said let us tilt the lances in a Khayyam lay.
Ishmail said: “Let us not squabble in a Wahabi way.
FitzGerald will be the precursor of a Norman day.”
And so, in Syracuse, most things did came to pass.
And Rufus and the Normans just,
Well, took it up the ass!
i need to read this when my brain is operational. did you catch the excellent BBC documentary on Omar Khayyam? a few years ago, maybe worth searching on YouTube. & while Fitzgerald did mess around with it, i still love his version(s). ‘wine, wine, red wine, the nightingale cries to the rose, her yellow cheek to incarnidine’ sticks, even if the spelling doesn’t.
i need to read this with my brain operational. did you catch the excellent BBC documentary on Omar Khayyam a few years ago? might be worth hunting down on YouTube, i’d certainly like to watch it again. & while Fitzgerald did mess about with Khayyam’s writing, feeding in a lot of Western assumptions about what being oriental meant, i do love his version(s). ‘Wine, wine, red wine’ the nightingale cries to the rose her yellow cheek to incarnidine’ sticks, even if the spelling doesn’t. (apologies if this post appears twice, i forgot to log into WordPress first).
They don’t like it up ’em!
A Fatwa, a fat one and a phat one__
God must chuckle at everythin’,
or so He seems a convenient Human Being (with benefits).
Way down upon the Shani river
Far, far away…
Imagine Stephen Foster in that wold;
then he shoulda find some apt doo-dah
llike as which you couldn’t throw a rubaiyat:
“De Shanghai chicken, when you put him in de pit,
He’ll eat a loaf of bread up, but he can’t fight a bit…
I go to de fair for to see de funny fowls_
De double-headed pigion an de one-eyed owls
De old lame goose wid no web between his toes
He kills himself a laughing when de Shanghai crows.”
De Shanghai chicken won’t be caught a daid in China on any Saturday.
You’ll need to go to India, to find where he roosts on Satay.
I put him in a pot with Mandarin oranges, to warrant:
he feel at home.
“Bootleg Billy” I calls him by a name,
tho’ he only crows on Rufus; he’s an Orangeman just the same.
Shorely as Otto the Orange was the Saltine Warrior
o’ the Syracuse Orange. A supercoincidence, I dare to say,
but I think not. So let us kilt the lances in Mumbai and Bombay,
to Pyongyang, Tarshish, Pul, and Lud and where ever else you assay.
Even the mighty jinni-uine are often but tha faek.
Mercifully, we might fall back on the problematic evidence
of the inconsistent revelations. Tho many be culled, a few wilt dew.
:)