T'was a bit of harmless fun. I think diarrhoea was spelt incorrectly as well just to top it off.

No intention to offend - high falutin' was because I could not think of anything else and as for the ends..well they had to rhyme.

Yes, as is plain, poetry is not my forte'.

Pericles,
<As far as I'm concerned, poetry is the performing seal of literature.

Clever, perhaps, and certainly difficult to do well. But ultimately a pointless act.>

Just for the sake of argument, Pericles, can you please advise what is not 'ultimately a pointless act"?
Poetry is surely that much less pointless, since it makes some momentary sense of a pointless universe (well at least the human sphere). Science and reason are every bit as pointless, apart from the hubris.

Here's a performing seal of the terminally jaded variety:

There was a young man who said, "Damn!
I have recently learned that I am
But a creature who moves
In predestinate grooves.
I'm not even a bus. I'm a tram."

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,761257-2,00.html

What does have a point? Macbeth spoke of the pointlessness of life after he heard his lady was dead:

Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last Syllable of Recorded time:
And all our yesterdays, have lighted Fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief Candle,
Life's but a walking Shadow, a poor Player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the Stage,
And then is heard no more. It is a Tale
Told by an Idiot, full of sound and fury
Signifying nothing.

Shakespeare entered many lives. Macbeth did not speak for him.

Sometimes a poem can help one to question the point of what one is doing. Recently there was much talk of the Anzac spirit, and politicians took it upon themselves to speak for the dead. I wish one of the speakers could have recalled the following:

The Man He Killed
by Thomas Hardy
(1840-1928)

"Had he and I but met
By some old ancient inn,
We should have sat us down to wet
Right many a nipperkin!

"But ranged as infantry,
And staring face to face,
I shot at him and he at me,
And killed him in his place.

"I shot him dead because –
Because he was my foe,
Just so – my foe of course he was;
That's clear enough; although

"He thought he'd 'list perhaps,
Off-hand like – just as I –
Was out of work – had sold his traps –
No other reason why.

"Yes; quaint and curious war is!
You shoot a fellow down
You'd treat if met where any bar is,
Or help to half-a-crown."

Ah Thomas Hardy, one of the great geniuses of the age, who wrote on pointlessness far more eloquently than Dostoyevsky, for mine, and yet he saw the poignancy of random events:
In a solitude of the sea
Deep from human vanity,
And the Pride of Life that planned her, stilly couches she.

Steel chambers, late the pyres
Of her salamandrine fires,
Cold currents thrid, and turn to rhythmic tidal lyres.

Over the mirrors meant
To glass the opulent
The sea-worm crawls -- grotesque, slimed, dumb, indifferent.

Jewels in joy designed
To ravish the sensuous mind
Lie lightless, all their sparkles bleared and black and blind.

Dim moon-eyed fishes near
Gaze at the gilded gear
And query: "What does this vaingloriousness down here?" ...

Well: while was fashioning
This creature of cleaving wing,
The Immanent Will that stirs and urges everything

Prepared a sinister mate
For her -- so gaily great --
A Shape of Ice, for the time far and dissociate.

And as the smart ship grew
In stature, grace, and hue,
In shadowy silent distance grew the Iceberg too.

Alien they seemed to be;
No mortal eye could see
The intimate welding of their later history,

Or sign that they were bent
By paths coincident
On being anon twin halves of one august event,

Till the Spinner of the Years
Said "Now!" And each one hears,
And consummation comes, and jars two hemispheres.

Dear Poirot,

I'm glad that we share a love of books.
Who can read J.R.R. Tolkien's, "The Lord
of the Rings," without having one's mind
painted with the people of Middle Earth
on a mighty imagined canvas?

Dear Squeers,

You have a tendency to cast a most becoming
light on others - it's called charm!

Dear Pericles,

Perhaps you'd better re-read my opening post.
Dorothy Auchterlonie (or Green), in THIS poem
takes Puccini's opera "Madame Butterfly," and
places the characters at Nagasaki, the second
site for the atomic bomb drop ....

She places them in HER poem at Nagasaki AFTER
the bomb drop - I would have thought that it
was obvious from the poem. In no way is there
any suggestion that they weren't always there.

The result is as I wrote, an extremely powerful
expression of living with the consequences
of our actions, and the moral choices we are faced with
in life,

"Benjamin Franklin Pinkerton still believes
That only American wives are real."

A statement that proved only too true throughout
Asia, where American servicemen were stationed. And:

"...No penalities-only consequences,
Which Pinkertons cannot evade
Any more than butterflies."

Poor Butterfly! The devastation of Hiroshima and
Nagasaki is beyond human comprehension. As Dorothy Green
wryly points out,

"Even in 1900, Madame Butterfly was out of date.
Fidelity, acceptance, death or dishonour -
What quaint anachronisms!
Lieutenant Pinkerton showed the way
The world willingly followed,
Deaf to the final, questioning chord."

I hope this clear things up for you - and what the
poem is actually about. As for your feelings about
poetry - just like art - its subjective. To me
poetry is a perfection when done well.
And response to its magic is spread
across humanity. As Dorothy Butler tell us:

" Poetry and children go together.
Babies are born loving rhythm and the sound of the
human voice. Parents instinctively rock and croon
to them from birth; surely, the first song in the
world must have been a lullaby."

Perhaps no one ever sang to you Pericles?