"Helen, the radiance of women..." - Homer

Had Helen of Troy been a modern American woman,
she would have checked her email, called her boss,
updated her Facebook page, looked at her calendar,
gone to the gym and talked with her therapist
before running away with Paris.
She would also have consulted her girlfriends
to determine if he was really that into her
and examined a bevy of relationship
self-help books just to make sure.
Certainly, she would have googled him,
had a friend perform a credit check,
and demanded an STD clearance from his doctor.
When the ships and soldiers arrived
to redeem her honor and rescue her,
she would have told them in a huff
that she was an independent woman
quite capable of taking care of herself
and didn't need the help of any men,
before stepping over the dead male bodies
and accepting a free ride home.
Later she would write a wildly popular
estrogen drenched memoir about her trials
filled with spiritual advice, travel notes and recipes.
Paris, of course, would be conveniently dead.
Some stories do not improve when updated.
  - mce

Society is a mortician.

It will try to make your life a coffin.

Then it will try to make you fit.

If you don't, it will gladly
cut off, your arms, legs and brain
so that you do.

Do not allow it. Be your full self.

Stretch your limbs; use your brain.

When the time comes, lie down and
stretch out on the rich earth whole.

Laugh at the mortician. Die like
a warrior, the same as you lived.

  ~mce

He who laughs last
has only
just got the joke.

The guillotine drops,
she knits
balaclavas
for the dead.

Eversince my heart stopped beating,
My life just keeps repeating.
I can feel nothing, no sorrow, no pain;
There is something I just can't regain.

Life seems so out of reach, and;
Yet I still walk.
I eat flesh and blood just like my own,
Not knowing what is right or wrong.

Caught in the trap of being too nice and that's that,
Can't fault that, won't alter, but like a bolt from the blue,
suddenly I'm through with being sugar,
****** it,
I'm going off central. going to be slightly mental,
going to wig out, drop out, opt out of the system,
dig out the old-style,
**** the sweet smile
I'll frown and I'll grouch
be a downer and slouch,
I'm busting my ***** here so you'll see a
better man, but it's the trap I fell into,
I'll get out on my own.
And yet
I can feel the taste of it, see
the utter waste of it
****** it
I'll do it
tomorrow.

And let her loves, when she is dead,
  Write this above her bones:
"No more she lives to give us bread
  Who asked her only stones."

The night flopped over the chimney tops
and dripped from the guttering as
the day broke through in spots
I could hear the house martins sing.

The radio sizzled, the
bacon crackled,
on the range was a pan
full of porridge from the
morning before.

Boots by the door which were itching to go
everything's slow when you want to go fast but
at last we were out on the last day of the world,(a
game that we played where zombies were real and
they were coming for us to make of us a meal)

Each day is a  bonus where the onus to be, is
the King of all castles, the Queen of all seas and
to seize with both hands the hands of all friends.
The day ends with a call from,
Mother, you know,
everything goes fast when it ought to go slow.