Feel like I'm looking for my soul

Like a poor man looking for gold.

King of the Mud

Yertle the Turtle:

"Hooray!" shouted Yertle.  "I'm the king of the trees!
I'm king of the birds! And I'm king of the bees!
I'm king of the butterflies! King of the air!
Ah, me! What a throne! What a wonderful chair!
I'm Yertle the Turtle! Oh, marvelous me!
For I am the ruler of all that I see!"

Then...from below, in the great heavy stack,
Came a groan from that plain little turtle named Mack.
"Your Majesty, please... I don't like to complain,
But down here below, we are feeling great pain.
I know, up on top you are seeing great sights,
But down here at the bottom we, too, should have rights...

Theodor Seuss Geisel.

Look around

Everywhere you turn is heartache.

Omnes viae

Rome:

You search in Rome for Rome? Oh traveller!
In Rome itself there is no room for Rome,
a corpse is all its churches put on show,
the Aventine is its own mound and tomb.
There, where the Palatifie once towered and reigned,
are medals ruined by the hands of time,
they show how more was lost to chance and time
than Hannibal or Caesar could consume.
The Tiber flows still, but its current guards
a city that has fallen in its grave—
each wave's a woman tearing at her breast.
Oh Rome! From all your beauty, all your grandeur,
whatever once was firm has fled . . . what once
was fugitive maintains its permanence. 

Robert Lowell.

And the wheels are turning and turning

I guess I kinda understand why this Lynchian ditty might've found its way into the Starship Troopers soundtrack, but it still seems a bit odd.

Sparrows Fall Aslant His Gaze

Ode for the American Dead in Asia:

God love you now, if no one else will ever,

Corpse in the paddy, or dead on a high hill

In the fine and ruinous summer of a war

You never wanted. All your false flags were

Of bravery and ignorance, like grade school maps:

Colors of countries you would never see—

Until that weekend in eternity

When, laughing, well armed, perfectly ready to kill

The world and your brother, the safe commanders sent

You into your future. Oh, dead on a hill,

Dead in a paddy, leeched and tumbled to

A tomb of footnotes. We mourn a changeling: you:

Handselled to poverty and drummed to war

By distinguished masters whom you never knew.

Thomas McGrath.

Hey, Kitten, what's going on?

As Operation Esptein Fury is unleashed, all I can say from my privileged space is that I'm super lucky to be so busy at work - juggling 3 different audiences and courses, multiple times a day, with an added bonus of our team's all-hands onsite this coming week - that I can (and must) compartmentalize.

Well, mostly.  The siren song of social media keeps drawing me into the doomscrolling shoals, even as I try to distract myself with broken lab environments and Unrivaled playoffs.  I'm really getting too old for this shit.

On occasion, the kids have asked me what my favorite decade was.  Hands down, the 90s.  I was young, and full of optimism because the Cold War was over, so it really was a rocking time with as close an approximation to a peaceful world as I've ever known.

In a related vein, Sadie asked just this morning if Sam was pranking her when he said I'd met Bill Clinton.  I did!  Well, I shook his hand, at any rate, when he came to Burlington for a rally in September of '92.  

Pat Leahy introduced him, and proceeded to shout himself hoarse over the course of the event.  The following Monday at the office, I announced that I had shaken the hand of our next preznit.  One of the rare times I've been right about anything political.

And that makes me 1 (one) handshake away from Trump, Putin, and the Dalai Lama, so I got that going for me.

Pax.

PS - In case it isn't clear, blogging will be light, mostly poetry/video signoffs.  Got a lot on my mind, no time to rant.

An eighteenth century brain

In a twenty-first century head.

intellectus agens corvorum

Business of Ravens:

What are these ravens doing in our trees,
Calling on doom and outworn prophecies?—
Flying in threes.

Their sinister shadow, their funereal wing
Blots the fresh color out of everything.
They do not sing,

Nor shake their throats like all the other birds;
But, in cracked monotones or broken thirds,
Their crooked words

Cowardly and contemptuous are thrown
At scarecrows who, with business of their own,
Let them alone.

Louis Untermeyer.

Мама, я знаю, мы все сошли с ума

Mama, I know we all went crazy.

Keeps on Slippin'

Time:

There are places things go to be forgot—
the tip of your tongue, the back of your mind—
like retirement colonies (the Linger
Longer Mobile Home Park), like the bridges
suicides spurn, like the last spot 

you remember seeing your car keys.
One of them is memory, city of ghosts.
We have catch phrases for them, but they're still
uncaught. Storage is easy and retrieval
hard, but no salesman tells you this 

because the product bought you long ago.
Me too. We're like the perfume in a room
a woman left yesterday for the last
time. We're here. We're stale but sensible.
We need somebody to remember us. 

William Matthews.

#throwbackthursday

Nary a snowflake on island this winter, which would've greatly disappointed Bailey.  (Feb '22) 

Bless your soul, you've got your head in the clouds

Is this song about AI?

And You Are...?

To an Intra-Mural Rat:

You make me think of many men
Once met to be forgot again; 
     Or merely resurrected
In a parenthesis of wit,
That found them hastening through it
     Too brisk to be inspected.

Marianne Moore.