Banana Republican

Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana.

—Anon.

A child contrived of Moctezuma and Nell Gwyn

(if not of Pocahontas and Ben Franklin)

in a fit of noncommittal I was born.

My genealogy at best is dim.

What's it to me if Dad were Cicero ("Chickpea")?

Bliss to be alive in that refulgent dawn,

already as an infant, and evolving spawn,

I shot my favorite spores as far as I could reach:

O hemispheric mycelium, mould of the free!

From Gulf of Trump to Patagonia's freezing beach,

'shroom 'publics sprang up, from sea to shining sea,

each with its patriotic banner

and presidential particolored sash,

a vaunted history, a torrid solipsistic manner,

basting its bombastic brats with nepotistic cash.

Back of them all, inevitably, the Big Banana.

Message to be found washed up in a plastic bottle in the former Costa Rica, ca. 3,000 CE.

The Beggar's Opera

Godfrey Kneller, painting of an unknown man traditionally identified as John Gay

Life is a Jest, and all Things show it,

I thought so once, but now I know it.

—John Gay (1685–1732), epitaph on his tomb in Westminster Abbey, written by himself

What's memory? And is it time?

Or are we time—memory, its line?

The past is just a blurry face.

The joke's in the bits that we embrace,

The dead we loved, the going style.

Gay little knew what Brecht and Weill

Would make of his Opera and his wit,

And would he have approved of it?

Nobody’s best is ever good enough,

Some of us realize that; others don’t.

I’ve lived my life incompetently.

Signaling from around the bend, there’s nobody.

This should be the final line. It won’t.

Envoi

L’Opéra de quat’sous

in Malakoff—hard for me and you,

my dear, our French not up to it—

one staging post that I recall

on this long road into the Fall.

Friday, February 20, 2026

It Never Rains but It Pours

Paul Klee, Fire Clown (1920), National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC

“These winds will plummet your feel-like temps drastically.”—Weather Report

One day it may be useful to remember all this.

—Vergil, Aeneid 1.203

America's feast's movable

Even though New Yorker

Cartoons have turned unfunny.

And yet, and yet, and yet . . .

The promises aborning

Won't pay what one used to get

For jokes in ready money.

Blow, blow, thou winter's wind.

For natures so refined

There's little well designed

Or so I fear to find.

(Don't like to be unkind!)

We seek to find excuse

Philosophy let loose,

But it's no cockamamie use:

Those feel-like temps are blind!

Thursday, February 5, 2026