Memory, that Gulfy Sea

“O Duty,

Why hast thou not the visage of a sweetie or a cutie?”

—Ogden Nash

Flog your vermilion

blood, your cold bones streamed

in the copy shop of the mind, cracked cranium, skull exposing

iridescent entrails—

innards of the spirit,

a rainbow of motley and multicolored birds of the soul preening at all azimuths, unashamed of themselves, conscience, lime-feathered; common sense, porphyry, streaked with white crystal; lust, maybe rose madder . . .

but black as midnight, memory—

that gulfy sea.

Note:

An earlier version of this poem—here mercifully abbreviated—appeared in Sparks of Calliope in November 2021 under the title “Mnēmosynē.”

Thursday, October 23, 2025

The First Word

William Blake, The Ancient of Days setting a Compass to the Earth (1794)

“Decíamos ayer . . . "—Miguel de Unamuno

“As we were saying yesterday . . .”

Remember if you would

those voices that you heard

above you in your cradle,

and your very own first word:

“No!”

Miguel de Unamuno: Del sentimiento trágico de la vida /The Tragic Sense of Life (1913)

Miércoles, 22 de octubre de 2025

Struldbruggery

Thomas Cole, Destruction. From his 1836 series The Course of Empire. New York Historical Society Museum.

. . . [they] would in time become proprietors of the whole nation, and engross the civil power, which, for want of abilities to manage, must end in the ruin of the public.—Swift, Gulliver's Travels (1726)

 “The American experiment will soon turn 250. Is its time running out?” Johan Norberg, Washington Post, October 12, 2025

Artificial General Intelligence,

It's thought, may in time

Reduce the world to paperclips,

And thus exterminate us all.

But our intelligence is both artifical and general,

Computers are only paperclips on stilts,

And as for public ruination . . . why, it’s always been.

Rome fell, a German scholar calculates, for 210 different reasons.

We’ve uncounted more—they come on thick and fast.

The likes of human AGI learn little from the past,

Would be immortal, with eternal youth,

Buy the highs and sell the dips,

Live on Mars, if so it goes—

Nothing like Swift's Struldbruggs' woes,

Who lived for ages, then got confused.

Notes: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2025/10/12/america-roman-empire-decline-fall/?itid=hp_mv-top-stories_opinions_p001_f011; https://courses.washington.edu/rome250/gallery/ROME%20250/210%20Reasons.htm.