Amor fati

"So why? . . . 'Because you can't say better than that.' I have at last said all that I have to say."*

—translated from Romain Gary's suicide note, December 2, 1980

Drained of the curse he valued most,

He blew his brains out. War hero,

Twice winner of the Prix Goncourt,

Now “insanely rich,” he'd reached

His terminus ad quem, the end

Point. But I, who long ago passed

My own terminus a quo,

Can see he fibs, enslaved when young

By Testosterone, then sold down

The River to Old Age. Nietzsche

Advises amor fati—love

Your fates, but a little further on—

Quite near—Big Terminus awaits.

No excuses, at last; a sounding gong.

*« Alors, pourquoi ? Peut-être faut-il chercher la réponse dans le titre de mon ouvrage autobiographique, La nuit sera calme, et dans les derniers mots de mon dernier roman: "Car on ne saurait mieux dire".

Je me suis enfin exprimé entièrement. »

Cover image: Thomas Moran, Moonlit Shipwreck at Sea (ca. 1901). Private collection.

Friday, October 3, 2025

Ah bon ?

Papers publishing bad poems

Reject my muse-inspired gems.

Crafting acceptable by them,

Should, of course, be a word salad

Of chopped-up, clichéd bric-à-brac

—For sure, not some kind of ballad!—

And take a whinging, cringing crack

At targets that invite a whack.

Alas, it isn't “easy peasy”!

Even with autocorrect’s idiot "aid,"

The quotidian leaves me queasy!

One explanation I'd hazard,

Is that to write poems truly bad

You must embrace a world that's mad.

I've tried a jab at Amazon,

At bashing Musk and Ellison;

Citing Haircuttery small talk,

I've Piggly Wiggly bons mots wrought.

Ah, me! Though larded with such stuff,

My lines are never bad enough!

Wednesday, October 1, 2025

A New Head

Guņabhadra, an Indian Buddhist monk,

arrived in China around 435 CE. He

“struggled to teach the Dharma in Chinese. . . .

until one night he dreamed that a kindly

sword-wielding god cut off his head

and replaced it with an exact replica.

The next day, he could speak Chinese

fluently.”*

We cannot summon up new heads to order,

and I’m no teacher of the Dharma!

Yet I gaze from my Old Gold mountain aerie expectantly,

burnishing my tarnished pissant karma—

hoping to see a headsman deity.

*Donald S. Lopez Jr., Buddhism: A Journey through History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2024), 52.

Tuesday, September 30, 2025