Underground Listmaker

Jamie McKendrick - Sky Nails That first day, to break me in,  my hardened comrades sent me scampering like a marmoset from the topmost parapet  to the foreman's hut  for a bag of sky nails.  The foreman wondered which precise  shade of blue I had in mind.  It's still sky nails I need today  with their faint threads and unbreakable heads  that will nail anything  to nothing  and make it stay.  There are a few interpretations of Sky Nails  that seem plausible. For me, it's the last three lines that really tell me what it is I find so compelling about it...nailing "anything to nothing and mak[ing] it stay" for me means that the sky nails the protagonist has fetched from the mysterious "foreman" (a deity of some kind?) are the tools needed to keep themselves together; they represent the psychological means for a desperately struggling person (perhaps, particularly, someone who has some sort of mental illness) to hold on.  1. K...

"The Waste Land" by T.S. Eliot  “A heap of broken images, where the sun beats, And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief, And the dry stone no sound of water. Only There is shadow under this red rock, (Come in under the shadow of this red rock), And I will show you something different from either Your shadow at morning striding behind you Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you; I will show you fear in a handful of dust.” “My nerves are bad to-night. Yes, bad. Stay with me. 'Speak to me. Why do you never speak? Speak. 'What are you thinking of? What thinking? What? 'I never know what you are thinking. Think.” The Waste Land is one of the most impactful pieces of poetry that I have ever read. A British work written in the wake of WWI, it is an early example of modernism in poetry, and in fact inspired the entire literary movement almost on its own. It requires heavy interpretation and direct attention from the reader to understand and digest i...

Henry Howard "The soote season, that bud and bloom forth brings  With green hath clad the hill and eke the vale;  The nightingale with feathers new she sings;  And turtle to her make hath told her tale.  Summer is come, for every spray now springs;  The hart hath hung his old head on the pale;  The buck in brake his winter coat he flings;  The fishes flete with new repairèd scale;  The adder all her slough away she slings;  The swift swalllow pursueth the flies small;  The busy bee her honey now she mings;  Winter is worn that was the flowers' bale.  And thus I see among these pleasant things Each care decays, and yet my sorrow springs. " To me, this poem is about observing how life goes on about you, but you still feel stuck; you can see and even appreciate the beauty of the world, but you, yourself, are unable to progress, time passing you by with the same ball-and-chain still weighing you down.  This playlist is not ent...