Promises promises

Well, it was something of a blinder.  How many people would be readily able to answer the question

What promises have you to give?
Or give up on? Or break? 


I fiddle-faffed about and made many a false start, none of them really felt right or honest.  By that I don't mean confessionally, gut- or bean-spillingly honest about Me and My Life, which, as we all know (don't we, sisters and brothers?), is no kind of pre-requisite to writing anything worthwhile at all.  Just feeling truthful, not histrionic or false or self-conscious or whatever. And I wondered if perhaps I'd really been pretty much bowled out this time and perhaps it was the moment to declare and call it a day.

Then one day last week Molly got me up too early to make tea and too late to go back to sleep, and, as I hoped might happen, I more or less sat down and wrote a response in about half an hour (not including reworking and consultation).  It's quite possibly flippant and jog-trot and not Serious Poetry at all, but funnily enough I'm remarkably proud of it, not least because I achieved a single B-rhyme through six verses (that's twelve rhymes) without a single repetition (unless you count 'new' and 'knew', which I suppose you should), and a changing intermediate rhyme which includes 'count on' and 'mountain', which isn't quite as cheekliy virtuoso as Geoffrey Hill's 'acrostics' and 'joss sticks' but is fairly bare-arsed...

Anyway, whether or not you've a clue what I'm talking about (it's Friday night after all,  I'm a couple of glasses of wine down and you're probably not there at all), I've posted a new response poem in answer to Plutarch's question at Compasses.  Go read.