fallen verses

Poetry Thursday is gone, :( . The traveling edition of it has run out of steam, :( . But, we cannot have Thursdays without Poetry (actually, I’m fairly sure most of us poets cannot have any day without poetry!) so Tiel and Mike have taken over the reigns of Poetry as it is incarnated on Thursday, with their new site: Totally Optional Prompts. The premise: each week, they will post a writing prompt (much as Poetry Thursday did) which the following Thursday you may or may not follow it as you post something Poetry related on your blog. For their part, they will provide a post where people can put Links! to their blogs to share these posts with other poets and poetry lovers. And all, specifically, on Thursdays! I’m not so keen on their icon, so I’ll not be posting that, but please do check them out. I don’t anticipate having internet access for the rest of the week, so I’m posting a bit early and won’t have my link on their Thursday post unless I do end up having access. We’ll see. I wrote this piece inspired by the prompt for this week:

Salt, Girl

I chase you into the cabin,
trailing sand showers in our wake,
and the echo of surfboards.
In the purple of twilight
your sarong is tinted
as I coil it on the floor.
In front of the fireplace,
the sea water dries quickly
and I taste the salt
as I kiss your breasts.
While I lie awake through dawn
and I hear the waves gently rocking,
I still taste the salt
and remember the sweetness.

As a note, I always welcome constructive feedback, even though I’d likely ignore it. :)

Edit (Saturday 10-13-2007):
All right. Because I never checked the lobby of the hotel for wifi access, I’ve been cut off since I got here Tuesday night. Now, about 24 hours before I leave, I see someone on the ‘net in the lobby sans broadband phone card. I drag the laptop down here, and after screwing around with some networking settings, got connected, and put the permalink to this post over at TOP. More delicious posts here.

According to a Reuters article, “President Hugo Chavez railed against a new trend in beauty-conscious Venezuela, giving girls breast implants for their 15th birthday.”

It seems Chavez disagrees with this practice, calling it “the ultimate degeneration,” and supporting “Western-imposed consumerist icons such as Barbie dolls.”

1. I do not support socialist doctrine. At all. From what I read on the news sites, the people seem to like Chavez. I don’t care.

2. I am rather fond of breasts (on women, go ahead, call me an objectifying, misogynist pig, whatever…) but I have no inherent preference for larger or surgically augmented breasts. Nothing against them either, I consider it a personal choice of the woman (or, in some rare but conceivable case, man) who wants to have her body altered.

I have to agree with Chavez. I don’t think it’s appropriate to be giving 15 year old girls breast implants. While I hesitate to use the phrase “too young” it seems the appropriate one. I don’t know how Venzualan law compares, but, in the US, at 15 a minor cannot enter into contractual arrangements. I think putting them into a situation resulting in permanent and artificial alteration of the body (and not on the small scale of ear piercing) for reasons of pure vanity is exposing a particularly shallow view of women in society.

Eh, the typing is getting terrible and I have little more to say. I don’t like this idea. Now, if these “presents” were given at 18, 21, 35 or 80, I wouldn’t feel as much apprehension about the act, but at least let these girls get to know their bodies as adult bodies before changing them.