O Fortuna, imperatrix mundi

The thirteenth-century Goliardic poem "O Fortuna" in the Carmina Burana manuscript. Bavarian State Library.

Oh, what a pity she had only one titty

To give her poor baby to suck;

The poor little bugger will never play rugger

Or give a young lady a fuck!

—British military traditional

It's said that poets should convey the truth,

But that I think's a bridge of sighs.

My own aim (Hope you don’t think it uncouth!)

Is crafting the most convenient lies,

For truth is never simple, and a lie is plain,

Bald-faced, relieving, can be used again,

As many times as needed to explain

Why you are screwed and I am not; defies

The premises of fortune and men's eyes.

My stocks rise, yours go down the drain,

The beautiful in love feel little strain!

Fortune, the Goliards knew, rules the world.

Hang on to that. And keep your bust umbrella furled.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goliards

Wednesday, November 5, 2025

Spuyten Duyvil

Ernest Lawson, Shadows, Spuyten Duyvil Hill (ca. 1910)

 “I ask you, what's the point of stealing something if no one knows it's stolen save the stealer?—John Banville, The Blue Guitar

When I first came to America, in 1972,

I walked out one morning in Riverdale,

New York, on garbage pickup day

And marveled at the things Americans threw away.

I've been here over half a century, and still do.

They toss out their own history, dismayed by its suspect smell

(but Ambrose Bierce could have told you that as well).

Incredibly, many now seem to be discarding jazz,

Louis Armstrong is, for lots of them, a been that has,

Ditching their native music and its holy arts,

Replacing truth with meretricious farts.

In Riverdale, that April morning, I retrieved a black sweater

And wore it till it wore out—when I found a better.

One man’s trash is another’s treasure—

Objets trouvés have always been a pleasure.

I do, of course, exaggerate.

And you’ve a pile of nothing on your Amazonian plate.

Wednesday, October 8, 2025

The Saints Go Marching In

“Voted that the earth is the Lord's and the fullness thereof; voted, that the earth is given to the Saints; voted, that we are the Saints.”—minutes of the town council of Milford, Connecticut, 1640

Sanctity

Of sanctity we make no bones:

On stolen land, we build our homes;

All countries in which men abide

Knew slavery and genocide.

Don't confess to ancestral crimes—

You were not there in those bad times.

Just be quite sure that we can say:

“They fake things fairer now today!”

Epigraph source: Alan Taylor, American Colonies (New York: Penguin Books, 2001), 192.

The Pitiless Bronze

Ours is not a world propitious to Poetry,

Though for poets’ tales it is, with screwball odds:

Homer’s “pitiless bronze” slew living, breathing bods!

Uhlans charged

Nazi Panzers at Krojanty.*

Fishing boats trump aircraft carriers in the Pinkish Sea.

* Evidently Polish cavalry did not in fact charge Nazi tanks at Krojanty in 1939, but did charge machine guns.