Binge and Purge

Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher, vanity of vanities; all is vanity. . . .

Go, eat your food with gladness, and drink your wine with a joyful heart.

—Ecclesiastes 1: 2; 9: 7 (KJV)

“Pass the vomit bowl,” my late friend

Piers Horey used once to say

In his inimitable way.

Well, now the Regurgitation’s

Done, ready for a different

One? Don’t peoples also feel the urge

Like foolish kids to binge and purge—

Spew, shut your eyes, just lie in bed?

But that’s not what the Preacher said!!

No, really, have a drink. It’s fun!

Enjoy yourself—this’ll be done

A whole lot faster than you think:

As swift as stomping on a roach,

My Alternative Grim Approach.

January 21, 2025

Cybernetics

In the Israel of the future

All Jewish robots will wear electronic yarmulkes

And Palestinian ones Wi-Fi-enabled keffiyehs.

In the Iran of the future, no robot will be tempted by another’s flowing locks:

They’ll all be fitted with approved (inorganic) cocks.

North Korea's chief exports are wigs, false beards, eyebrows, and eyelashes,

Which barber robots will reap from the masses.

While in the Ireland of the future,

Robots will chant, “Mea culpa, mea

maxima culpa!” in factories and shops,

And recite, unfailing, 24/7,

twelve Hail Marys on the hour.

O world, what then, a wondrous place,

With little left to sour, or disgrace!

Monday, January 20 2025

Biodegradable Souls

Peccavi

Latin: "I have sinned."

When he was young, he did small wicked foolish things

That burden him now, sixty years later,

Although the world might consider them merely venial—

Commonplace, of scant importance.

If he could change one thing, these he'd undo.

But they’ll haunt him till the end of his days, spilt milk,

Unless he embrace the one and only solution

He can perceive, through the anguish of that old guilt,

And beg forgiveness for all the sins of others, too.

Poor Me!

Much of her memory’s a work of fiction—

The novelistic genre called “Poor Me!”

More poignant than postmodernism (though not, perhaps, "post-post")

Its romans à clef depict the past as toast,

Assigning to a junk room family oubliette

Countless bites and pieces one’d rather now forget!

Reality

This is the real world:

The mogul in his mansion

Paid for by domestic munitions,

The bomber at his bombsight

The Nazi in his tank;

The bacon-eating billions,

Whose "human, all-too-human," biodegradable souls, unthinking

Savour the fruit of untold animal suffering,

Oblivious of our sacred sapient task—

These must, alas, all be forgiven, too?

O God of myriad gods, but it’s a lot to ask!

Alexander Aguin, Plyushkin, an illustration for Nikolai Gogol's 1842 novel Dead Souls—a character whose name in Russia is a metaphor for compulsive hoarding.