I am warmhearted and icy cold,
with a pretty face that's getting old.
I am fragile yet tough as a man,
struggle thru life with no real plan.
I am petite and cuss like a trucker,
slightly naive, but I'm no sucker.
I am a sinner with a halo of gold,
an open book with secrets untold.
I am a hypocrite but always play fair,
a bleeding heart and I don't care.
I am a mother who acts like a child,
crazy, impatient and easily riled.
I am spontaneous and I am a bore,
forever forgiving, I still keep score.
I am unstable and wonderfully wise,
a ****** deviant in sweet disguise.
I am creative and self-destructive
naturally skilled and unproductive.
I am shy and I am outspoken
with a heart of glass, easily broken.
I am awkward and well refined,
lost, insightful and a little love-blind.
I am respected and I am addicted
shamed by burdens, self inflicted.
I am a perfectionist and I am a slob,
unbiased and shallow, an inept snob.
I am nocturnal, a creature of night,
blissfully ignorant, typically right.
I am cautious and I have no fear,
a loser and quitter, still I persevere.
I am brilliant and easily amused,
over-zealous and under-enthused.
I am impervious with wounds to heal,
a habitual liar just keepin' it real.
I am witty and weird and mean-
I am what I am.......100 Aileen.

So you know you’re looking at two very different styles of dress, here. But precisely what decades? When did that waistline move back down? What details are the defining touches of their era? How long were women actually walking around with bustles on their backsides?

Lydia Edwards’s How to Read a Dress is a detailed, practical, and totally beautiful guide to the history of this particular form of clothing from the 16th to the 20th centuries. It tracks the small changes that pile up over time, gradually ******* until your great-grandmother’s closet looks wildly different than your own. As always, fashion makes for a compelling angle on history—paging through you can see the shifting fortunes of women in the Western world as reflected in the way they got dressed every morning.

Of course, it’ll also ensure that the next lackadaisically costumed period piece you watch gives you agita, but all knowledge has a price.

I spoke to Edwards about how exactly we go about resurrecting the history of an item that’s was typically worn until it fell apart and then recycled for scraps; our conversation has been lightly trimmed and edited for clarity.

The title of the book is How to Read a Dress. What do you mean by “reading” a dress?

Basically what I mean is, when you are looking at a dress in an exhibition or a TV show, reading it in terms of working out where the inspirations or where certain design choices come from. Being able to look at it and recognize key elements. Being able to look at the bodice and say, Oh, the shape of that is 1850s, and the design relates to this part of history, and the patterning comes from here. It’s looking at the dress as an object from the top down and being able to recognize different elements—different historical elements, different design elements, different artistic elements. “Read” is probably the best word to use for that kind of approach, if that makes sense.

It must send you around the bend a little bit, watching costume adaptations where they’re a bit slapdash. The one I think of is the Keira Knightley Pride and Prejudice, which I actually really enjoy, but I know that one’s supposed to have all over the place costuming-wise.

Yeah, it does. I mean, I love the BBC Pride and Prejudice one, because they kept very specifically to a particular era. But I can see what they did with the Keira Knightley one—they were trying to keep it 1790s, when the book was written, as opposed to when it was published. But they’ve got a lot of kind of modern influences in there and they’ve got a lot of influences from 30, 40 years previously, which is interesting to an audience and gives an audience I suppose more frames of reference, more areas to think about and look at. So I can see why they did that. But it does make it more difficult if you’re trying to accurately decode a garment. It’s harder when you’ve got lots of different eras going on there, but it makes it beautiful and interesting for an audience.

The guide spans the 16th to the 20th century. Why start with the 16th century?

Well, partly because it’s where my own interest starts, in terms of my research and the areas I’ve looked at. But more importantly in terms of audience interest, we get a lot of TV shows, a lot of films in recent years—things like The Tudors—that type of era seems to be something that people are interested in. That time is very colorful and very interesting to people.

And also because in terms of thinking about the dress as garment, obviously people wore dresses in medieval times, but in terms of it being something that specifically women wore, distinct from men’s clothes, I really think we start to see that more in the 15th, 16th century onwards.

Where do you go to get the historical information to put together a book like this? What do you use as your source material? Because obviously the thing about clothing is that it has to stand up to a lot of wear and tear and a lot of it doesn’t survive.

This is the other thing about the 16th century stuff—there’s so little surviving. That’s why that chapter was a lot shorter and also that’s why I used a lot of artworks rather than surviving garments, just because they don’t exist in their entirety.

But wherever possible, you go to the garments themselves in museum collections. And then if that’s proving to be difficult, you go to artworks or images, but always bearing in mind the artist will have had their own agenda, so they won’t necessarily be accurate of what people were actually wearing. So then you have to go and look up written source material from the time—say, diaries. I like using letters that people have written to each other over the centuries, describing dress and what they were wearing on a daily basis. Novels can be good, as well.

Also the scholarship that has come before, the secondary sources, works by people like Janet Arnold, Aileen Ribeiro. Really well researched scholarly books where people have used primary sources themselves and put their own interpretation on it can be really, really helpful. Although you take some of it with a pinch of salt, and you put your own interpretation on there, as well.

But always to the dress itself wherever possible.

What are some of the challenges you face, or the constraints on our ability to learn about the history of fashion?

Well, the very practical issue of trying to see garments—some of them I did see here in Australia, but a lot of them were in the States, in Canada, in New Zealand, so it’s hard to physically get there to see them. And often, even when you can get to the museum, garments are out on loan to other exhibitions or other museums. That’s a practical consideration.

But also, especially when I’m talking about using artworks and things, which can be really helpful when you’re researching, but as I’ve said they do come from a place where there’s more interpretations and more agendas. So if someone’s done a portrait and there’s a beautiful 1880s dress in it, that could have been down to the whims of the person who was wearing it, or the artist could have changed significantly the color or style to suit his own taste. Then you have to do extra research on top of that, to make sure that what you are seeing is representative.

It’s a fascinating area. There’s a lot of challenges, but for me, that’s what makes it really exciting as well. But it’s really that question of being able to trust sources and knowing what to use and what not to use in order to make things clear for the audience.

Obviously many of these dresses were very expensive and took a lot of labor and it wasn’t fast fashion—people didn’t just give it away or toss it when it fell out of season. A lot of times, you did was you remade it. When you’re looking at a dress that’s been remade, how do you extract the information that you need as a historian out of it?

I love it when something like that comes up. I’ve got a couple of examples in the book.

Well, it can be quite challenging, because often when you’re first looking at a piece it’s not obvious that it’s been remade. But if you’re lucky enough to look inside it and actually hold it and turn it round different angles, there’ll be things like the placement of a seam, or you’ll see that the waist has been moved up or down according to the fashion. And that’s often obvious when you’re looking inside. You can see the way the skirt’s been attached. Often you can tell if a skirt’s been taken off and then reattached using different pleats, different gatherings; that can give you a hint that it’s then been remade to fit in with a different fashionable ideal.

One of the key ways is fabric. You can often see, especially in early 19th century dresses when they’ve been made of these beautiful 18th century silks and brocades. That’s nice because it’s the first obvious clue that something’s been remade or that an old dress has been completely taken apart and it’s just the fabric that’s been used. I find it particularly interesting when the waist has been moved or the seams have been taken off or re-sewn in a different shape or something like that. It can be subtle but once your knowledge base grows, that’s one of the most fascinating areas that you can look at.

You page through the book and you watch these trends unfold and there are occasional sea changes will happen fairly quickly, like when the Regency style arises. But how much change year-to-year would a woman have seen? How long would it take, just as a woman getting dressed in the morning, to see styles just radically alter? Would you even notice?

Well, this is the thing—I think it’s very easy, when we’re looking back, to imagine that in 1810 you’d be wearing this dress and then all the frills and the frouf would have started to come in the late 1810s and the 1820s, and suddenly you would have had a whole new wardrobe. But obviously, unless you were the very wealthiest women and you had access to dressmakers who had the absolute newest patterns and newest fabrics then no, you wouldn’t have seen a massive change. You wouldn’t have afforded to be able to have the newest things as they came in. You would have maybe remade dresses to make them maybe slightly more in line with a fashion plate that you might have seen, but you wouldn’t have had access to new information and new fashion plates as soon as they came. To be realistic, there would have been very little change on a day to day level.

But I think also, for us now—it’s hard to see it without hindsight, but we feel like we’re fairly fluid in wearing the same kind of styles, but obviously when we look back in 20 years, we’ll look at pictures of us and see greater changes than we’re now aware. Because it happens on a slow pace and it happens on such a subconscious level in some ways.

But actually, yeah, it’s to do with economics, it’s to do with availability. People living in towns where they couldn’t easily get to cities—if you were living in a country town a hundred miles away from London, there’s no way that you would have the resources to see the most recent fashion plates, the most recent ideas that were developing in high society. So it was a very slow process in reality.

If you have a lot of money you can change out your wardrobe quicker and wear the latest styles. And so the wealthiest people, their clothes were what in a lot of case stood the best chance of surviving and being in modern collections. So how do we know what working women would have worn or what middle class women would have worn?

Yeah, this is hard. I do have some more middle class examples, because we’re lucky in that we do have quite a few that have survived, especially in smaller museums and historical collections, where people have had clothes sitting in their attics for years and have donated them, just from normal families over the years.

But, working women, that’s much more difficult. We’re lucky from the 19th century because we have photographic evidence. But really a lot of it will come down to written descriptions, mainly letters, diaries, not necessarily that the people themselves would have kept, but there’s examples of people that worked in cotton mills, for instance, and people that ran the mills and their families and wives and friends who had written accounts of what the women there were wearing. Also newspaper accounts, particularly of people who would go and do charity work and help the poor. They often wrote quite detailed descriptions of the people that they were helping.

But in terms of actual garments, yeah, it’s very difficult. Certainly 18th century and before, it’s really, really hard to get hold of anything that gives you a really good idea of what they wore. But in the 18th century—it’s quite interesting, because then we get examples of separate pieces of clothing worn by the upper classes, like a skirt with a jacket, which was actually a lower middle class style initially and then it became appropriated by the upper classes. And then it became much fancier and trimmed and made in silks and things. So then, we can see the inspiration of the working classes on the upper classes. That’s another way of looking at it, although of course that’s much more problematic.

It’s interesting how in several cases you can see broader historical context, or other stories happening through clothes. Like you point out that the rise of the one-piece dresses is due to the rise of mantua makers, who were women who were less formally trained who were suddenly making clothing. Are there any other interesting stories like that, that you noticed and thought were really fascinating?

There’s a dress in the book that a woman made for her wedding. I think she was living on her own, or she was living with a servant and her mother or something. She made the dress and then turned up to her wedding and traveled quite a long way to get there, and when she arrived, the groom and all the guests weren’t there. There was nobody. So she went away and came back again a week later, and everyone was there. And the reason that no one was there before was that a river had flooded in the direction that they were all coming from. She had obviously no way of finding out about this until after the fact, and we have this beautiful dress that she spent ages making and had obviously gone to a lot of effort to try and work out what the latest styles were, to incorporate it into her wedding dress.

Things like that, I find really interesting, because they talk so much about human and social history as well as fashion history, and the garment is the main way we have of keeping these stories alive and remembering them and looking into the kind of life and world these people lived, who made these garments.

Over the centuries, how does technology affect fashion? Obviously, we think of the industrial revolution as really speeding up the pace of fashion. But are there other moments in the history of fashion where technology shapes what women end up wearing?

One example is where I talk about the Balenciaga dress from the early 1950s—with a bubble hem and a hat and she would have worn these beautiful pump shoes with it—with the introduction of the zipper. Which just made such a huge difference, because it suddenly meant you’d have ease and speed of dressing. It meant that you didn’t have to worry about more complicated ways of fastening a garment. I think the zipper made a massive change and also in terms of dressmaking at home, it was a really quick and simple way that people had of being able to create quite fashionable styles on a budget and with ease and speed at home.

Also, of course, once women’s dress started to become simpler and they did away with the corset and underwear became a lot less complicated, that made dressing a lot easier, that made the introduction of the bias cut and things that sit very closely to the natural body much more widely used and much more fashionable.

I would say the introduction of machine-made lace as well, particularly from the late 19th, early 20th century onwards where it was so fashionable on summer dresses and wedding dresses. It just meant that you could so much more easily add this decadent touch to a garment, because lace would have been so much more expensive before then and so time-consuming to make. I think that made a huge difference in ordinary women being able to attain a kind of luxury in their everyday dress.

That actually makes me think of something else I wanted to ask you, which is you point out in your intro the way we casually use this word “vintage.” I think about that with lace. Lace is described as being a “vintage” touch but it’s very much this question of when, where, who, why—it’s a funny term when you think about it, the way we use it so casually to describe so much.

Oh, yes. It’s crazy. I used to work in a wedding dress shop and I used to make historically inspired wedding dresses and things. And brides used to come in and say, “Oh, I want something vintage.” But they didn’t really know what they meant. Usually what they meant is they wanted something with a bit of lace on it, or with some sort of pearls or beading. I think it’s really inspired by whatever is trending at the time. So, you know, Downton Abbey became vintage. I think ‘50s has always been kind of synonymous with the word vintage. But what it means is huge,

'Tell me I'm not in a dream. Or one of my trances.' She uttered the two sentences between gasps and seem-to-be quickening pulses. In midair, the tension between them kept growing intensely, trying desperately to meet its peak every second, before finally disappearing into the sightless distance above it. 'You're not,' the man said, his voice distant even when his face was only a few inches from hers, and cupped his free hands around her chin to calm her pale face. Her cheeks were warm in his palms, as if being burnt by hundreds of heaps of dying, yet ravenous flames. She closed her eyes, recording the touch of his perfect skin that seemed able to charm her endlessly since the first time she had fixed her gaze on his shimmering features. The angelic voice which accompanied it woke her a few seconds later. 'And even if you are,' he traced his soothing fingers along the reddening skin of her cheeks, 'I'll bring you back to life. Which is here.' He emphasised the last two words with a smile, a heartbreaking, infuriating smile - because of its astounding beauty, before tenderly touching his cherrylike lips to hers, making her start to tremble uncontrollably in deep confusion. She was, again, in the middle of these steep rocks without any aid to support her unstable weight, meanwhile the air over their heads began to twirl in circles, the weather around them getting pink and turning red in five seconds' time. She was lost. In someone else's magical world, with a rendition of one of The Beatles' hit singles from the 1900s or 1950s - she could not exactly recall which period of years it came from - playing smoothly in the CD player in the languid atmosphere of the living room behind them.
After a moment of enjoyment the kiss brought them he pulled back, before slamming his left hand into the tiny depth of his shirt pocket and taking a silver locket out of it. He threw a confident smile at her, and in one blink of his eye, the room fell dark. Petrified yet washed out by the sudden darkness among them, the girl let out a heart-rending shriek, which was followed by her heaving her body onto him, making his head hit the floorboards and the long necklace break in half. In seconds, blood-red light began to shuffle out of the center of the torn necklace, mingling with the air outside its shell and sending the woman into gradually-coming unconsciousness. She could now only see shadows, muttering and brimming all over the weather around her, and had not the strength to stand up apart from lying helplessly on the feathered carpet beneath. Before her, she saw how he started to rise and reveal his claws, and fangs, and bright red eyes above her. He laughed mercilessly. Instantly, she covered her sweating face with her hands - which now felt too shaky and she hated it, she loathed it very much - and brought out a despondent, lamented sound of cry. Her evil lover, at the same time, continued to soak up as much energy as possible from the change of circumstance.
'Again, I successfully, harmlessly tricked you,' he whispered this to her right ear. Around them, the horrendous wind potter faster and faster meanwhile their invincibly powered circles got bigger. 'You should thank me for that.'
'Th... Thank you for what?' She abruptly gathered her courage to confront him. If this meant that the end of my life was approaching, I would be ready, she thought silently.
'For letting me bound my ways into your life again, Em,' his angelic voice replied, and before she realised what was coming next, she wailed with all of her might when she laid her eyes on his real monstrous, vampiric face before her.
'I am indeed sorry to say that you - a clever and sanguine girl like you - was granted the chance to relish your life only momentarily,' he cleared his throat. 'You have always known that you could not outrun us at the end..., and so have your family.'
'No,' she mumbled, and drifted her gaze to his face - his now burning face. 'NO!'
'No,' he mockingly repeated her words, 'or YES, my dear?'
'Don't call me using that 'D' word, beast,' she put her best effort to yell at the top of her lungs, ''cos I am not your dear, and prefer death to becoming one of you!'
With those last few words, she scrambled to her feet, and stood up in just two swift movements. In her both hands, which he did not know were protected by the two stashes of garlic and one wooden cross in her dress pockets, were two shiny swords with special blades carved onto their two edges which were designated to **** vampires. Get rid of them. And their malicious world of beasts.
She stepped forward, and new powers began to regenerate inside her - despite the cries she felt start to roll into her heart, upon knowing that her beloved Joe had died. Joe had been deceased now. He was lifeless, and no longer able to help her here. She should never have ditched him. It dawned on her now, when everything was already too late to fix up. But she knew that she should never give up. Javier and his vampire family might have tasted every single drop of her other family members - and the rest of Ludirus town's residents - including her Joe, before she idiotically kicked him out for this pathetic, heartless beast who wore a disguise to displace him. She stretch the first sword - the one in her right hand - out to him. He took a step back, his eyes remained focused on her.
'You won't hurt me,' he pretended to be in pain, and in one and a half seconds, he transformed into the figure of the innocuous, blue-eyed prince once more.
'I won't be deceived by your looks, pig,' spat her, meanwhile her brain rummaged through a thousand ways to stick the two swords into his chest. That was, in fact, the only way to **** him. To drain his evil life out of him.
'You were, once,' he laughed, the sound of his devious laughter echoed in the very room, and later left it in such dread and wariness.
'Not anymore,' she bravely took a step forward and, without any further doubt, without caring about her being imprisoned for the rest of her life before getting her blood dried by the fangs of Javier's two older brothers, she stabbed the swords into his chest with all the energy she had left. And the effects sprayed out by the action were beyond any of her expectations. Thousands of blood droplets poured out of his body and onto the floor beneath her, flooding the entire living room and finally the streets outside the building until no litter, little scraps of food, and wheels of vehicles were seen anywhere in sight. Surprisingly, these endless streams of blood did not cause any floods, and rapidly soaked through every single layer of soil the earth had on its surface. The blood that had been consumed out of the poor people of Ludirus, the rural village in South Ireland, famous for its cruel killing rampage for several thousand years, where a group of aristocratic vampire ruled the lives of humans and their own species. But now, there would be no more of them. No more of their horrible treatments. No more of their sneaking-up-on-humans tricks they secretly did at night - to savour human blood, which was lawfully removed from the protecting-human law renewed every year. It was all a lie. Yeah, a lie. A lie that allowed Javier's family to approach Lucinda's family members to be victims in their lifelong killing spree. But now, there would be no more vampires, thought Lucinda as she kissed her holy cross and sets of garlic affectionately. There would be no more blood sacrificed to fend for those beasts' hunger, even though it meant for her to live alone. Live on her own, as she no longer had anyone around her to turn to. To soak up her tears when she was scared away by the bunch of vampire kids on the way home from school. To calm her with her melodious chords at the piano. Mother. To serve her the best spaghetti in the world as a reward for her outstanding grades at school. Sister Sheila. To rub her back and put her to bed at night - at the age of sixteen! Father. Luce's tears just would not stop while she kept counting her memories, as every single shadows of her deceased beloved came back to her. And finally, the sight of her Joe lying his tired head on her lap, and reading out loud to her his newest poem he composed at the office for her. All were gone. Dissolved into the ravenous sea of blood in the guts of those psychotic, simpering, abusive monsters.
But she was satisfied. She felt, somehow, proud of her heroic, or at least, brave actions. She had taken control of her fear, and that was one of the most important characteristics a woman should have to succeed in this cruel world, her father had once said. Now she could prove to them all that she was a newly reborn person, and was no longer the old Lucinda. Lucinda Hale who had always been the 'tail' of her sister while they were six and four, and the little, spoilt daughter of Jim and Aileen Hale who could not hold a plate properly in every banquet their family was invited to. Luce knew that she was now completely a stranger to her family. She squinted her eyes shut, trying to imagine how nice it would be to show off her new self to her late family if only they were all alive with healthy pink cheeks now. In her own peace and this momentary solitude, she found herself sinking onto the floating warmth of blood, but strangely, she did not fall. She did not plunge into the limitless red colour underneath, and remained flowing above it while her tears started to crawl out of her eyes. She did not know, and did not want to know how long this remained until she eventually felt the rough surface of the bearskin carpet again. She woke up with a dizzy head and quickly threw a hasty look around her living room. The prince, beastly Javier had vanished. Oh, there are his remnants, she thought and unconsciously, chuckled quietly to herself when she came to take hold of several white, lifeless bones laid in front of her. Then suddenly she understood what had just happened. The legend in that book she had borrowed from the library transported the knowledge back into her mind. All the members of Javier's family had been crushed now. They were dead. Her sacred tears, which came to mix with the blood flood, became the cure for all the people who had been ****** by the vicious vampires in town. They were now freed, and reawarded, although still mortal, but yet a very rare, elusive, privileged chance to be alive once again and start their lives all over again. They must not be far from her now, thought her. Without any further wait, she raced out of the room, and wormed her way onto the street.
And here they were. The streets of Ludirus were no longer deserted. Traditional markets with a thousand-metre long series of antiques roamed them, occupying every single tiny space provided to place racks containing jewels, valuables, and gold pots. There were also shelves of books about cookery, traditional healing potions, sports, literature, and anything else someone ever wanted to buy. And then she spotted a book with a bright yellow cover, entitled 'Love Poems: From 1900 to the Present, by Joe Grogan.' Her breath seemed to stop at that time and suddenly, before she even got the opportunity to touch the cover of the copy in front of her, two warm arms wrapped her waists and turned her body around to face the owner. Once again, she was at a terrible loss for words. 'Joe,' she mumbled.
'I am,' the writer nodded solemnly. And just like the evil Prince Javier had done before, he pulled out a beautiful silver box and opened it. Inside, two rings shined beautifully before their eyes, radiating a smile as bright as the one seen on others' faces among them. A smile that celebrated the comeback of their long-lost independence. Before she knew it, Joe knelt before her, and presented the ring upwards onto her.
'What would you like to do first, Madam? Marry me, or buy my book?' He grinned and held both her hands. Before she could answer him, he inserted her left ring finger into the perfectly made ring, and helped her right hand fasten his own ring onto his finger. She lifted him up and wrapped her hands around his neck.
'Do you have time for both, Sir?' She rubbed his smooth cheeks and kiss them before looking deeply into his hazel eyes.
'Absolutely,' he answered firmly, and scooped her whole weight into his arms and spinned her around. Luce could no longer say anything when a sudden wave of happiness washed all over her, and became even at a more unfathomable loss of words when she caught the sight of her beloved father, mother, and her sister, all alive, start approaching to deliver their congratulations. Here we are, she thought with a satisfied feeling. We were, are, and will always be meant to be together.

Aileen was not mean.

She moved with all speed, but always did heed
Her patient’s queries and calmed all her worries

Though quite understaffed, performing her craft,
She left smiles of great cheer, and grins, ear-to-ear.

May her vacation have shouts of elation.
And her energy never seek to evade her.

One of the most beautiful of all Barry Hodges' "Memories" poems, and one in which a sad death occurs

O how sanguine your author was, that
After so many bitter heartbreaks
On the rocky road to Love
(sweet Nirvana shared with a special kindred soul),
This would be the Big One,
The dawning of my joyous future,
A future to be enjoyed in togetherness
With the woman of my dreams,
A charming full-breasted Highland lassie.

I smiled in innocent anticipation
Of what might transpire
As I waited to meet my wee Aileen
That lovely Scots summer evening
In the bonnie Pass o' Killicrankie -
Her selection of such an inconvenient,
Yet spectacularly gorgeous spot,
Reflected what I had come to appreciate
Of her romantic nature, thus boding well
For our first physical encounter.

Although we had not hitherto met
In the full flesh, so to speak,
I felt I knew the dear girl well,
Having exchanged increasingly amorous emails
On an exclusive dating website
http://brokenhearts-renewed-by-hotspunk.co.uk*
And the semi-draped digital photo
Made my heart go pit-a-pit-a-pat
And made my sporran twitch,
To put it mildly, dear reader.

And so I waited, bouquet in hand,
By the bridge o'er the Pass o' Killicrankie,
That warm evening last year
And the birds sang a gentle little song:
Tweet-tweet-tweety-tweet
They chirrupped, somewhat unoriginally,
And how my heart was gladdened
By their artless warbling, och aye,
But I knew not what tragedy lay
Just around the proverbial corner.

And then I saw her coming down the path,
Limping gently (I recalled she had mentioned
early on in our electronic correspondence
that one leg was slightly shorter than the other
thanks to an incident involving a rabid Rottweiler)
And, O dear Lord, she was indeed a beauty,
Truly a very tasty number indeed
(although at least ten inches shorter
than I had fondly imagined theretofore),
And I knew my prayers had been answered
(yet perhaps not one hundred percent ideally).

We embraced shyly as she rested her lesser limb
On a conveniently sited large round stone,
As we stood by the bridge looking out o'er
The spectacular Pass o' Killicrankie,
With its tumbling burn in the mighty ravine far below,
And she reached up on tippie-toe
So as to bring her lips up my mine
In order to seal our love, to plight our troth;
Och how my poor wee heart pounded
Like a steam-hammer at full throttle.

But Fate, cruel Fate intervened brutally
And her surgical boot slipped on the aforesaid stone;
Then she fell against the ill-maintained fence
Which inevitably snapped asunder
And my Aileen toppled over into the terrible depths
Of the famous Pass o' Killiecrankie,
Her arms flailing like semaphore.
O, but I shall ne'er forget her doomed shrieks
As she bounced over the granite rocks,
Landing with a fatal plop in the rippling stream
As it ran urgently in the crannies at the bottom
Of the legendary Pass o' Killicrankie.

There's aye a silver lining to this tale
As poor Aileen's handbag still lay on the path
And I quick perusal therein
Suggested I could go for a tasty supper
At the nearest hostelry and have plenty left over
To subscribe to a more explicit dating website
(perhaps one where only the physically perfect
would be allowed to register)
In the hope of better luck next time round;
But the memory of her dying gurgles
In the icy waters of the babbling brook
Coursing through the Pass o' Killiecrankie
Will live with me for all eternity
(well, a week or two at a rough guess anyway).

I found a locket,
a small gold one,
in a second hand store.
The flowers were worn
on one side,
on the other
was a beautiful
cursive inscription,
"Aileen."

It had a working hinge,
a locking clasp
& on the inside
was a tiny photo,
a debonair
handsome
smiling man.
This striking gent
didn't look like
he'd be named
the inscription.

As I pondered who he was,
I began to think
how special
the keeper to this possession
must have been,
'cause people didn't smile much
way back then
& somebody
surely
made him happy.

Susanna Berlinski Nov. 18
You look like a woman.

Reilyn Aileen Sanderson
**** okay?

Susanna Berlinski  
You should have a baby, just as an experiment.

Reilyn Aileen Sanderson  
what the hell is your problem ****

Loving you is like eating dark chocolates. . .
there is a hint of sweetness and bitterness all at the same time,
it makes my heart beat fast and slow.
In each and every bite,  I can taste life in both sides...

the mystery of lawlessness is bound to the "transcendence" of phonetic application of phonetic encoding... some call it the whirlwind of confusion, but somes also call it E-près and then write Ypres... well, the confusion is all but apparent... i left that in "     " to stress the ambiguity... yes, the -s is optional... it's neither possessive or plural... that, i could have learned in prison, had i ever been a Becontree purple (bishop)... dictionary moment: cranium, crimson, cradle... cardinal... but all these positions of power are on their knees (there's me trying in vain to underline that), they gobble-quote what they quack... which ends up being a circumflex and a wanking hand, embedded with "touching" Adam. oh sure they bypassed the contemporary-of-contemporaries... it was never a grey-matter affair... it was always a gangster's drill-to-the-bone moment... wait till he squeems! i don't mind ******, given the person is dead, i just hate half-asked half-baked half-bollocked Dr. Dre attempts and then failing and then, like a whining dog with its tail between its legs going back to the mantra of mother fiction... i ******* hate it... i start looking like a ******* ******! i hate it... mutter fiktion... all i'll say of a Jew: don't ******* bring an argument against the Palatine Schting right now... i have as much abhorrence against all things Egyptian as i do about English tea, which i deemed liquidated Werther's Original... and then there's this Russian ***** i'd like to the village bicycle... she's had more spare parts done unto her than the working limbs ever gave her the tilt... feminism and the sacredness of all women... name that movie quiz show... charlize theron... aileen wuornos! woo-or-nose? never mind...
   a 1K spectacle at Hastings... that's invoking quid...
and you'll feel more tonguing mollusks than
                          touching a frightened ****** quill-thread's
worth of deer with that lingo, had you ever had one...
              MONSTER!      yes, they all dream of a breakfast
at tiffany's... and i'm john paul the 2nd, and
     henry viii was a joke nursery rhyme
  when charlie bid farewell to diana...
there was no:
         divorced, beheaded, died, divorced, beheaded, survived...
there was only a car-crash... you can't make
    a king out of swine... well... you can... Sweyn...
                  but **** me... and i thought i was naive...
guess the ***** didn't kick in when it was supposed
to; once true journalism became the ****** of what
was once the ****** of the people...
             religion... journalism these days is rotten,
it's an Aristophanes to what's really happening
defined by Socrates... it's a schoolyard...
  journalism these days is best defined by Aristophanes;
and who's the globe-trotting-gobbler of all misfits
is not the would-be diarist of returning back to
the local, the usual, the sanctimonious mundaneness
of it all; you **** only once in your life,
you end up having a **** the rest of the time,
either with your hand, or with another body.

oh i'm not bothered about the "perverts"
(funny how only men are concerned with
being named that) -
                               that are watching you,
those third party incisors of
             the bony-**** (hey, you
could be yodeling **** by now) -
                          what i'm
worried about are the perverts that provide
the "perverts" with material,
it's all very much a Turning test...
               that robotics testing ground
of: i can't keep eye contact...
   the lesser privy of psychiatry?
eye contact and biting your nails...
if that can be engaged with and subsequently
avoided:
you're as chirp as chips! honey b.
          can anyone white
feel glamorous using language in order
to tell a joke?
   that's not the question, the question is:
why call it witty comedy...
     but still employ canned laughter?
it's discouraging, i don't know when the joke comes,
all i know is that the editor finds it funny
as that particular time,
                    and that's when he inserts canned
laughter... you can get it with the most
"witty" comedies there are...
  a bit like black girls trying to be white without
the frizz of afro curbing the afro with vaseline...
i've seen catfights over this "third limb"
scenario... afro is no go in catholic schools...
you have to... yum... cow lick that ****
into place... use vaseline...
      and that's an advert-and-a-half.
but you know what really ****** me off?
philosophers... they attacked poetry because
they couldn't care two-****'s worth about
whether language could be musical
or simply communicative... they're the ones
that wrote books without using
grammatical words such as verb, or noun,
because they made them excuses to
their muddles when hoarding from poetry
words of equivalent categorical weight
such as metaphor... so attacking the practice
of poetry, but then encouraging
the categorisation of the spoke
with poetic categories rather than grammatical
categories? can i see Hegel use a noun?
no... but i can see Heidegger using
  the metaphor with two labourers utilising
a hammer... that's the thing concerning
a building site: you either pass the time
tellings jokes... or you don't work
on a building site and hold a hammer
  and question whether someone else might need it...
philosophy is not about the existential dittoing
of the i...
    it's a book, but there's a new category of pronoun
due to universal bewilderment once childhood
finishes... ? opened the door, in stepped !
and said:
     shouldn't we make the stillness of the lake
into a mirror to banish but at the same time
          domesticate narcissus -
yes, replied ?, i'm glad you thought of it...
               domesticating demigods...
                    narcissus was a stillness of a lake,
sisyphus was a stone,
    hercules was bicep,
              achilles was a tendon...
                                       our current affairs are far
from democratic, but at least our history is,
  you get ******... you get protractor...
you get mona lisa... you get 'let 'em eat croissant!',
       too many points of divergence
  in a democracy to craft a convergent "democracy",
what the politics says is that we are all
slaves to what's called a *status quo,
  i hate the fact that western "democracies" are
no longer tagged as merely status quo...
abuse of nouns... or how philosophy attacked poetry
and never spoke a theory concerned with
language per se being evidently categorised...
     how status quo is actually a -nomer without a mis-
of democracy...
  funny, the spanish... i have no idea
why can i have some ice-cream?
      has to become ?can i have some ice-cream¿
           i guess it's like the english " and '...
  who said what, and who said what for whom?
    is there a narrator?
      is that " + 1 people speaking, or quoting a quote?
or is that direct convo... '   ',
later retelling the tale "     ",
and after that it's all but an urban myth
akin to the kentucky fried mouse...
                the French that blè blé blé blé....
and somewhere in between was the Transylvanian comma...
hmm...
                             i mean... the perverts...
   thanks for the invitation, r.s.v.p.; of sure, great mixtape...
funny thing is... i never filmed myself jerking off...
        i do a 3-in-1... take a ****, take a ****... and
clean the ****-talk ducts of banal sprechen while
      watching a monkey strutting down memory lane
of when i had a girlfriend... and had to juggle,
and go for lunch, and this that and the other,
and a dalmation... or the reflection: but i had a mother...
huh?     i never felt this much ingratitude
for occupying the premises of the oval chamber
as i did creating a signature or inserting
  myself into the least convenient space to have
later come out off using only one digit's worth of
accountability... but hey... that's life.
          are you feeling the guilt trip drug pushed
by your mother from Syria, or Somalia?
     you owe her! you parasite... makes easier argument
for the billion Blue Indians and Chinese to get on
with it and eradicate the over-sensitive ivory dodo;
or at least in Siberia with the mongols...
              so i'm guessing eskimo is the new
                        squint to what's butchery ethics in Kosovo
as: look away... nothing to see.
               still... why call it a witty comedy when
you nonetheless have to utilise canned laughter?
             and that's a novel in itself...
? went up the stairs and ? met ! questioning <
whether ? should be questioning <... instead ! suggested
that ? should be questioned by >, since ? was already
on the 1st floor, having ascended the stairs from
the ground floor...         can you write me
     a novel... replacing all the correct pronoun usage
with mathematical ambivalence structured toward
a mostly unread existential dogmatism using
  mathematical punctuation?
no one will read it...but hey... either you do something
like that... or own a dog or a cat...
           and yes, they call them diacritical marks
when they're within letters... but in between letters?
they call them punctuation marks within words...
or the microcosm of punctuation: syllabification...
          the French just gobble down a lot of
  deviation... mon fhhhhhhhhhhhhré!
don't ask me how they do it... ask Nápŏlyon,
yes, the half-wit from Li-ą... oh no... not
                                               Monsieur Dynamite.

where would bundy be
in the media age
presenting daytime tv
from the presidential stage
calling aileen out
for her feminist ways
fighting chikitilos foreign policy
tooth and nail

I am warmhearted and icy cold,
with a pretty face that's getting old.
I am fragile yet tough as a man,
struggle thru life with no real plan.
I am petite and cuss like a trucker,
slightly naive, but I'm no sucker.
I am a sinner with a halo of gold,
an open book with secrets untold.
I am a hypocrite but always play fair,
a bleeding heart and I don't care.
I am a mother who acts like a child,
crazy, impatient and easily riled.
I am spontaneous and I am a bore,
forever forgiving, I still keep score.
I am unstable and wonderfully wise,
a ** deviant in sweet disguise.
I am creative and self-destructive
naturally skilled and unproductive.
I am shy and I am outspoken
with a heart of glass, easily broken.
I am awkward and well refined,
lost, insightful and a little love-blind.
I am respected and I am addicted
shamed by burdens, self inflicted.
I am a perfectionist and I am a slob,
unbiased and shallow, an inept snob.
I am nocturnal, a creature of night,
blissfully ignorant, typically right.
I am cautious and I have no fear,
a loser and quitter, still I persevere.
I am brilliant and easily amused,
over-zealous and under-enthused.
I am impervious with wounds to heal,
a habitual liar just keepin' it real.
I am witty and weird and mean-
I am what I am.......100 Aileen.