h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

On my way home from the supermarket I tried to cook up a poem with absolutely no meaning but sounding so intellectual that it might leave critics discussing and fighting over it for decades to come.
But in less than two minutes the following is what I ended up with.
I'm calling it "Selfie Of My Self Deception":

I bathed in the twilight
of love and hate
took a swan dive in the ignorance
of social media
but came out unscathed
and voted for Trump

Now I wonder. Has anything like this - trying to write one poem but ending up with a totally different one - ever happened to any of my poetic colleagues? If so I'd like to hear about it

Not with poetry, but I sometimes start to write a story and end up with something totally different.

Emmanuel Schickaneder takes the prize for plot drift. His libretto for "The Magic Flute" started with a sympathetic Queen whose daughter has been kidnapped by an evil person named Sarastro. Then Schickaneder discovered that a similar story had just been mounted in a theater in the area, and he seems to have changed his mind in the middle of Act I. Sarastro becomes the good guy, and the Queen becomes the meanie.

Mozart's music is what connect these otherwise incompatible elements. George Bernard Shaw said that Sarastro's songs were the only musical expressions he had found that were worthy to come form the mouth of God. Mozart's sense of tonality is so extraordinary that it creates character where words could not have gone.

It is my favorite opera by a wide margin, even if its plot starts in Venus and ends in Mars.

Interesting!

And you just inspired me to write another poem. But that is for another thread you know

So, you start one thread and realize halfway through that you should be in another one?

That happens frequently

But that's not why I started this thread

I found that the poem I ended up writing was too serious to be put in that other thread you know, nudge-nudge--

I belong to the SPS:

Society for Prevention of Seriousness.

You can't be serious

That's why I belong.

QED

It sounds like a Point 22 in reverse: If you apply for a membership you are too serious to join

I made the organization up because I wasn't serious enough to want it to get started.

You can't make up stuff like this

But you can of course claim you did

Serious claims area lot of work. I prefer the unserious ones, which are easy.

Rarely I find, is the point to which one wished to end up, achieved as one thought first was desired, but, often, in the myandering route one takes, to arrive at teh destination, then missed, does, one, in fact, arrive at the point to which one really needed to be. or something... err... I don't know... I cna't remember what I was trying to say now

My friend, I think we are going to end up at the destination that was planned for us. We may or may not have much say in the matter.

Ahh, but were that alwasy so. I fear, for some, the destination is not the destination, but the path to the destination is the destination, an yet, as we travel the path, the destination itself cannot always be said to exist, as it was, for each step on the path, can render the destination less attinaible.... - I ruled out death as a destination when i became immortal

I was told the path was my destination
but like Bilbo and his companions
I was distracted off the path.

I later learned that paths are not always what they seem.
That's when I climbed up a tree.

One man's path may be another man's tree.
Or something

but a tree can be a path too as so can the branch, or the leaf, or the air itself, or just the festidual remninants of the time in the air, or the tree, or something.... nah, only kidding, its all about the beer realy I think, or the bacon sandwichs.... bound to be...

It's not the path I mind, it's the pathology.

I was going to say something pathetic but realized that belongs in another thread

I will meditate on path ethics instead for a while

we so need a 'like' button; Paul!!! marvelous!

We all have our pathologies..... but some of us have more peculiar pathologies than others or soemthing ... or just more pathologies full stop actually