Afterthought Unbound

When [the gods] were about to bring [living creatures] to light, they gave Prometheus and Epimetheus the task of dealing out the appropriate attributes to them. Epimetheus begged Prometheus to let him do the dealing. “And when I have dealt,” he said, “you shall examine.”—Plato, Protagoras 320d

To love, and bear; to hope till Hope creates

From its own wreck the thing it contemplates.

—Percy Bysshe Shelley, Prometheus Unbound

Truth to tell, I abhor an unbinding,

Yesterday’s pudding pretending as new.

Life rehearses an embarrassed reminding;

Dying concludes but a heads-up’s review.

My brother’s liver fed Caucasian raptors

Now even the buzzards spurn my own guts.

No use protesting the mitigating factors—

Sempiternal as ever, those ifs, ands, and buts.

Pandora rose from the soil to greet me

With gifts, and I cottoned to her lies.

Writing such lines to see what I'd see

(Teenage chicks pecking out my eyes!)

I judged the whole lot to be as dumb as could be

—Promethean fireflies. Damnèd disguise!

Note: Prometheus and Epimetheus, the ancient Greek names of the mythological twins alluded to here, are said to mean Forethought and Afterthought.

Monday, June 8, 2026

Being There: Poetaster Petitions the Moon on behalf of the Ants

I do not blink, wish on a star,

Improve to bits such things as are,

Unsatisfied with what is found

Adorning Dasein all around,

But since there's language in the end

I scribble down these words to send:

O captive Moon, who in your cage

Tirelessly feed on cosmic rage

Ignore this scientific stage,

Mere figment of a passing age.

ANTS abound everywhere, you see,

From here in the boondocks to DC.

Admit their many thousand kinds.

He lies who says they have no minds

That hurt, just like the monkey breed;

Their swarms are vast and mobile brains,

They need no cars or fast airplanes

To speed up pissant living’s feed.

That is the message that I send

By no means seeking to offend

Questioning who’s to be master

In dumb haste, to hurry faster.

—Yours truly, Puissant Poetaster.

Note: The German word Dasein, literally, “being there,” used by the philosopher Martin Heidegger in his 1927 book Being and Time to mean human existence, has become common parlance, even though there is often no there there, as Gertrude Stein said of her native Oakland.

Saturday, June 6, 2026

What the Butler Saw

"The whole trouble with Western society

Today," you said, "is the lack of anything worth Concealing."* Ah, Joe, how wrong you were!

A few weeks later, your “longtime companion” Ken beat your brains out with a hammer while You slept, nine blows "struck in a frenzy."

(Or might it have been a deliberate count?)

Washing down two dozen Nembutals

With grapefruit juice, he left a note to say:

“If you read his diary all will be explained.”

Now there was something worth concealing!

What the Butler Saw still has me in stitches.**

(Your comic masterpiece—you'd just finished Writing it—didn’t premiere till two years later.)

What we really lack aren’t secrets worth Revealing, but listeners who’ll accept them:

"Something sensational to read on the plane"

And somewhere worth going while you read.

I once revealed a thing or two myself—

But that was in a different frame of brain.

*Joe Orton, June 24, 1967, in The Orton Diaries, edited by John Lahr (New York: Harper & Row, 1986), 11.

**Joe Orton, What the Butler Saw, https://youtube.com/watch?v=a5Q8btlQLfE

Wednesday, June 3, 2026