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

Amor fati: Letter to an Unknown Friend

I am allergic to my lovely fate—

Which is to say, its trouble and strife.

In neither case are they to blame;

I can well alleviate the pain

And flinching live, once more, this life,

For I'm a nonesuch, doing "great,"

Who gets from work a bit of gain,

But wants inputs—perhaps a wife?

I write, as I always said I would.

We met sometime, but who knows when?

It must have happened, somehow good,

Though truth to tell, your face grows dim.

We never spoke—although we should

Have done so, dear, were now but then.

Wednesday, May 27, 2026