In Lieu of an Introduction
. . . he recommended to all those who might be impressed with a sense of their importance to bury a copy or copies of each work properly...
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Idyssey
A Desk-Drawer Anthology
Peter Richard Dreyer
The Red Maple
The Desperate Stars
Perhaps dark time itself might have it so!
Glimmering Thresholds
. . . cold my wrinkled feet Upon thy glimmering thresholds —Tennyson, “Tithonus” And yet my feet are not wrinkled (They look so young!)...
Fall
Fall is grievy, brisk.
The Serpent and the File: A Fable
Boomslang photographed near Botrivier, Western Cape, South Africa After La Fontaine In a time yet to be, when the art of writing and...
Behold
"Earth’s secret living pulse tells why . . ."
Skulduggery
The Angelic Doctor's name is down.
When Cats Misbehave
“Nobody can be exactly like me. Sometimes even I have trouble doing it.”—Tallulah Bankhead I must be the most successful poet of my...
The Ambush
The last Assumption is Disgrace.
Comedy
La vie serait une comédie bien agréable, si l’on n’y jouait pas un rôle. / Life would make great theater, were it not that one plays a...
Seeming and Savour
Rue, though bitter, it annealed.
Gnôle
The more things change, the more they are the same.
Biomimicry
The weasel’s not a model for the billionaire.
Fame
If they knew what we know, they’d be behind too!
Schadenfreude
Chaïm Soutine , The Table, Musée de l'Orangerie, Paris (ca. 1923) I saw a creature, naked, bestial, Who, squatting upon the ground,...
Opus Postumum
Woodrow Cowher, Unfinished Kant (2019) 1. Stephen Crane "Darkened his eye, his wild smile disappeared, inapprehensible his...
Velocity
“How miraculous and wonderful, hauling water and carrying firewood!”—Layman Pang (740–808 CE)* Though the handcart travels faster,...
A Penny for the Old Guy
Gunpowder, treason and plot.
The Russian Elephant
Four-part report of a Stalin-era Soviet delegation to a scientific conference on elephants: Classics of Marxism-Leninism-Stalinism on...
Homicide 101
We do the best we can!
Laika
God in his mercy lend her grace.
Doubt
Our doubts are traitors, And make us lose the good we oft might win By fearing to attempt.—Shakespeare, Measure for Measure Come...
The Dice Box: A Prose Poem
Max Jacob by Modigliani (1916) “The truth is always new.” —Max Jacob, Le cornet à dés (The Dice Box)† A Jew from Quimper in...
An Archaic Smile
Moscophoros (Calf Bearer), Athens Acropolis (c. 570 BCE) Music for a while Shall all your cares beguile.—John Dryden / Henry Purcell,...
Halloween 2024
Get set to sing a civic scream.
Role-Playing
“Never miss a good opportunity to shut up.” ― Will Rogers I am a minor character in my life. There’s no protagonist as yet. I fear that...
Tears
"They" is life's exponential rule.
Everyone Sometimes Does a Little Something Stupid†
Luck's the rhino in the room!
Tchotchkes
Gauguin, Jug in the Form of a Head, Self-portrait (1889). Kunstindustrimuseet, Copenhagen. Based on a severed head that Gauguin had seen...
Truth Telling
"Alexandra Meets Diogenes ." Postcard. M. Toumbis, Athens The most revolutionary act is a clear view of the world as it really is.—Rosa...
Diogenes
Katerina Anghelaki-Rooke (Κατερίνα Αγγελάκη-Ρουκ; February 22, 1939 – January 21, 2020) Translated by Peter Dreyer By the day I...
Crimean Memories, or, The Reason Why?
William Simpson, The Attack on the Malakoff (1855) : We don't want to fight but by jingo if we do, We've got the ships, we've got the...
Utterquidaunce: The Uncanny Valley
Tasmanian tigers. World History Archive / Alamy Stock Photo. "Outrecuidance" is arrogance, or conceit. Derived from England’s Norman...
Tractcatus
The cat meows. I translate this as “All philosophy is critique of language.”—Anon Nemosky, Particle and Wave Found in a Little Free...
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...
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,...
Thomas Hardy at Wimborne Market
Wimborne Minster "Remembering mine the loss is, not the blame, That Sportsman Time but rears his brood to kill, . . . Will you not grant...
Luck: Sophocles among the Dinosaurs
Statistics distinguishes three sorts of luck, circumstantial, resultant, and constitutive: (a) being in the right/wrong place at the...
Roots
“All this has been driven largely by the sinking of roots.”—Thomas Halliday, Otherlands A rhizosphere, or “world of roots,”* underlies...
No, no, Nunette!
Nun raises the sun out of Huh, primordial chaos, creating the world Chorus: No, no, no. No, no, no. No, no, Nanette.— No, No, Nanette ...
Future Tense
Chaïm Soutine, Le poulet plumé / Plucked Chicken (1925), Musée de l'Orangerie, Paris A hundred years from now, if anything human...
Osage
With a Nod to Old Possum In Amolosh’s book of impractical cats Osage deserves a special page! He’s ginger, large, and murderous of...
Moviegoing
Hiroshima mon amour was released in 1959. I was just twenty at the time And only saw it—at the Academy Cinema on Oxford Street—in...
Death of an Illusion
The fabric of the universe
is not a medieval curse
Sailing to Pissantium
With apologies to W. B. Yeats (1865–1939) This is no timeshare for cold fish! An agèd poet's but a meager dish, a folder of poor...
Against Perfection
"He has observ'd the Golden Rule Till he's become the Golden Fool." —Blake If, once in the sequence of our life, the instinct soul starts...
Tutti-frutti
The brain is layered like a tutti-frutti cake, So science tells us in a recent take. I sometimes wonder what that news is worth Given...
Sarabande
Hope's fugacious, hard to resist
French Made Simple
Le français c'est pas compliqué ! Un gars: c'est un jeune homme Une garce: c'est une pute Un courtisan: c'est un proche du roi Une...
Goggas
Insect Study by Jan Brueghel the Younger (mid 1600s) "Let the damned ride their earwigs to Hell, but let me not join them." —Herbert...
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