Memory Foam

I cannot see what I would see

Of sunlit days beside the sea;

What now are soul and heart to me

Who have mislaid that memory?

When in the search I cast about

For some mnemonic path or route

To lead to what I would find out

I stumble through cold waves of doubt

That sweep the ocean of this world

In which the quanta are unfurled

And fragments of the past are swirled.

To what blind future am I hurled

In which no lasting record sings

Of those now lost beloved things,

The hands once held, the silver ring,

Or even of our parting's sting?

All I can deduce from this

Is that a kiss is just a kiss;

Love is merely hit and miss;

Its music's but the ocean's hiss,

The cosmic background radiation

That is the shine on old tarnation:

Between the zero and the one

There's room enough to have some fun.

Wednesday, July 30, 2025

Wake Up Call

Ford Madox Brown, The Death of Sir Tristram (1864). Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, Birmingham, England

"Political satire became obsolete when Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize."—Tom Lehrer

O once and future King,

Arthur, asleep at Avalon,

. . . rex quondam rexque futurus . . .

The liberal delights of which we once were fond

Have been tossed under the bus,

Done in by algorithms

That someday soon a mighty solar flare

In smithereens will sweep away,

Or so we hope!

Most likely fate will do us in, instead,

Reduce us to AI's poor zombie dead.

Yet we would live, whom life was thrust upon—

We're fucked if we'll that way be gone!

With liberal democracy now no more the rage,

What better than to restore the Feudal Age?

Tuesday, July 29, 2025

Born Yesterday

You will eat, bye and bye,

You’ll get pie in the sky when you die.

—Joe Hill

The empyrean is a realm of fire,

Where God and His purported angels dwell,

Your shrinking heart’s secret desire;

What you in deep confusion debit, hell.

We were all of us born yesterday,

And cogitating draw our own conclusions.

Informing knowledge has too brief a stay;

Believing what it pleases one to think: delusions.

We’re not all that wrong, though, I'd say,

To deny the earthly terrors

Spelled out by what many've thought before

Fleeing this Comedy of Errors:

Tom Fools, harkening to the quire/choir,

We see only what we're meant to see,

Claiming the inheritance we require;

Hoping the end's not soon to be.

I dreamed I saw Joe Hill last night,

Alive as you or me.

“They shot you, Joe,” says I.

“Takes more than guns to kill a man.

“I never died,” says he.

Believe that, too, if it's what you wish.

We Wobblies can't survive time's organizing fire,

And guns kill men. How could they not?

Millions have died here, on this very spot.

Framed for murders he almost certainly did not commit, the Swedish American songwriter and Industrial Workers of the World (IWW; aka"the Wobblies") militant Joe Hill (aka Joseph Hillström) was executed by firing squad in a prison at Salt Lake City, Utah, in 1915.

Friday, July 25, 2025