Tractcatus

The cat meows. I translate this as “All philosophy is critique of language.”—Anon Nemosky, Particle and Wave

Found in a Little Free Library box on Preston and Rugby avenues,

“Nemosky” forbids me to reproduce this sally.

I plead its brilliance and Fair Use!

If one can’t plagiarize, well, really, what’s the use?

What's more, I’ve noticed that poems about cats

Exceed all others in popularity.

This great Eliot, too, discovered in old age.

Why it should be so’s a riddle of our time,

Puzzling even the wan ghost of Wittgenstein.

The Temptation of What’s Easy

Now I have grown into an age

In which to run a rhyme across a page

Is no more trouble than to lie awake

Scanning the night's silence for a quake

That in a distant land might kill

An infant conjured by my will.

Worst is, I fear the child is real.

It makes no difference what I feel.

Distraught, I imitate a poem by Yeats,

Hoping to pry open Morpheus' gates.

The fascination of what’s difficult,

He writes, has "dried the sap" out of his veins,

Shut in a stable by an ailing colt,

Whose sacred blood anoints its bolt.

What if—supposing all this—I read wrong?

Why, then, consult some other midnight’s psalm!

The Song of the No-See-Ums

Digital painting by Sukanto Debnath (Hyderabad, India, and Hungary, 2009)*

Boundless his wealth as wish can claim;

Despite those titles, power, and pelf,

The wretch, concentred all in self,

Living, shall forfeit fair renown,

And, doubly dying, shall go down

To the vile dust, from whence he sprung,

Unwept, unhonor’d, and unsung.

—Sir Walter Scott, The Lay of the Last Minstrel

“No-see-ums” are small biting flies

Not visible to careless eyes.

Their scientific name

is Ceratopogonidae.

So small, they nip and get away.

You’re itching for another day!

These punkies’ counterparts in brain

Are types of a deceiving strain.

The more ridiculous the tale,

They'll preach it to you without fail.

As creatures of fantastic lore,

They scarcely know what lies in store.

What they're taught by their mad master,

They gulp right down to void the faster.

Ignorance has been called a sin—

And so it is, deployed to win

By those whose end it is to harm,

By retailing a false alarm,

The polity from which they spring,

Buying into a con man's thing.

I’m sure you know now who I mean.

You met him in a nightmare dream.

*https://www.sukantodebnath.com/

October 11, 2024