Haven't You Felt A Peculiar Sort Of

What's Somewhat Puzzling Is That Churchill Himself Knew What The Reaction Would Be To Any Sort Of Aerial Attack On Cities, Because In 1938 He Said That In A Future War British Cities Would Be Attacked By Bombing, And That The Response Would Be That All Men Would Want To Join The Fight Because They Would Be So Incensed By This Cowardly Manner Of Attack. Which Is A Very Natural Response: When Something Drops On You From The Air And Blows Up A Bunch Of Buildings And Kills People In Their Sleep, The Reaction Is Going To Be Rage, Confusion, And A Search For Something To Destroy In Retaliation.

The Equivocations, The Confusions, The Contradictions. There's No Way We Can Live Through Or Comprehend Something So Big That Happened So Long Ago. We've Lost True History. But If We Are Willing To Tolerate The Contradictions, And If We Suffer Through Events Rather Than Ticking Them Off, We May At Least Get Closer To Understanding What Happened Than If We Grip The Handrail Of A Carefully Polished And Reassuringly Heroic Narrative.

I Blush Easily. I Have Difficulty Meeting People's Eye, Difficulty With Public Speaking, The Normal Afflictions Of The Shy, But Not To A Paralysing Degree.

Haven't You Felt A Peculiar Sort Of Worry About The Chair In Your Living Room That No One Sits In?

So What Rhyming Poems Do Is They Take All These Nearby Sound Curves And Remind You That They First Existed That Way In Your Brain. Before They Meant Something Specific, They Had A Shape And A Way Of Being Said. And Now, Yes, Gloom And Broom Are Floating Fifty Miles Away From Each Other In You Mind Because They Refer To Different Notions, But They're Cheek-by-jowl As Far As Your Tongue Is Concerned. And That's What A Poem Does. Poems Match Sounds Up The Way You Matched Them When You Were A Tiny Kid, Using That Detachable Front Phoneme.