Poem for Thursday and Fair Midway

Fairground
By W.H. Auden

Thumping old tunes give a voice to its whereabouts
long before one can see the dazzling archway
of colored lights, beyond which household proverbs
cease to be valid,

a ground sacred to the god of vertigo
and his cult of disarray: here jeopardy,
panic, shock, are dispensed in measured doses
by fool-proof engines.

As passive objects, packed tightly together
on Roller-Coaster or Ferris-Wheel, mortals
taste in their solid flesh the volitional
joys of a seraph.

Soon the Roundabout ends the clumsy conflict
of Right and Left: the riding mob melts into
one spinning sphere, the perfect shape performing
the perfect motion.

Mopped and mowed at, as their train worms through a tunnel,
by ancestral spooks, caressed by clammy cobwebs,
grinning initiates emerge into daylight
as tribal heroes.

Fun for Youth who knows his libertine spirit
is not a copy of Father's, but has yet to
learn that the tissues which lend it stamina,
like Mum's, are bourgeois.

Those with their wander-years behind them, who are rather
relieved that all routes of escape are spied on,
all hours of amusement counted, requiring
caution, agenda,

keep away: – to be found in coigns where, sitting
in silent synods, they play chess or cribbage,
games that call for patience, foresight, manoeuvre,
like war, like marriage.

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My Wednesday was pretty similar to my Tuesday with the exception of talking to my high school friends at lunch, including the father of one whom I've known since I was ten, so that was lovely. I found someone on Freecycle who wanted my empty genre series cases, and it turned out to be a guy from New Zealand who made a prop for one of the Lord of the Rings movies, so it was fun to give him cases for those movies. 

We ate leftover Indian food for dinner, which was excellent, then we watched The Orville's "Midnight Blue" with Cheryl, which I enjoyed a lot -- it felt almost like a movie, or at least a very good Star Trek two-parter, it confirmed Topa as the central character of the entire season, and I was happy both with the political and family resolution even if they were a little too quick for believability. The midway at the county fair: