The Second Serving

[cdybedahl]

In another forum, neofob started paraphrasing W. B. Yeats' The Second Coming. jennyaxe played along, and they started taking turns doing every other line. This is the result.

Cooking and cooking on the rotating skewer
The pieces of the meat disintegrate
Things fall apart; the dinner cannot hold;
Mere messiness is loosed upon the world
The tandoori-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of dining well is drowned
The best lack a clean napkin, while the worst
are full of too-well-cooked ingredients

Surely some naan is at hand;
Surely the second serving is at hand.
The Second Serving! Hardly are those meals out
When a vast helping out of the kitchen's ovens
Troubles my sight: somewhere in heaps of rice
A shape with doughy body and the head of a beer
A scent strong and pitiless as something burnt,
Is moving through the hall, while all about it
Reel shadows of the delicate dessert treats.
The ice cream drips again, but now I know
That twenty indian chefs of luxurious kitchens
Were vexed to nightmare by a burning oven
And what stale bread, its flour come round at last,
Rises insides the ovens to be burnt?

Comments

[watervole.livejournal.com]

That's scarily good. I like it. Now tell them to go back and do the first two lines...

[cdybedahl.livejournal.com]

Jenny just told me that they did, but they did them last so I got them in the wrong place when I assembled the thing. Stupid of me not to notice, really. It's been corrected.

[apel.livejournal.com]

It was most impressive. Assuming it was an existing piece of filk, I googled on the first few lines as they were writing them and was very surprised when I didn't get any hits.

[kerravonsen]

*admiration*

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

Yeats is always good for apocalyptic stuff - can't remember any BtVS fic based on him, which is very odd.