Anyone Smell Burning Paint?

Prepositions are like burning paint. Forget grammar and think about potatoes.

—Gertrude Stein

The despotic words that I inherit

Wanting recognition of their merit,

Syntactic insolence gets worse and worse,

With young prepositions asserting rights,

Adjectives complaining bitterly of slights,

Conjunctions that have learned to curse,

Pronouns unwilling apparently to wait,

Verbs that attack the prefrontal gate.

Fractious nouns keep slipping out of date,

While rhyming couplets—idle, vapid things—

Desiring hotter music drag their wings.

I write a poem almost every day—

But could anyone unravel what's to say?

Rejoice, O fond musicians, in your craft,

Whose genius elevates you far above

Loquacious vocables in search of love!

Written upon reading Francesca Wade's superb new biography Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife (New York: Scribner, 2025)

Friday, January 9, 2025

¡Ay, AI!

"No one travelling on a business trip would be missed if he failed to arrive."

—Thorstein Veblen

Caught in toils of artificial

Stupidity, cupidity

Seems the clear explanation. Well,

Don't think that lightly is the case!

The spider's caught in its own web.

In the dumb ebb of usury,

Tycoons, fallen prey to history,

Will pay the piper’s vengeful fee.

Wednesday, January 7, 2026

A Million Nows

I reckon it must be a million nows

Since that Sunday on Upper Montague

Street in 1963 when

We three, snug in our new nest,

Breakfasted on bagels, avidly

Read The Observer and The Sunday Times,

And thought . . . What did we then think?

I forget,  of course, vividly though that now

Now returns to me in its forlorn nowish way

Like a dog lost on a holiday a thousand miles away

That turns up again one day, with a sheepish smile,

Having somehow made its way back,

Against

All the odds, that proudly says, “I'm not like other dogs!

How could you lose me when the time is now?

I am distinct, exist, I’m me. No matter what you do,

I'll always love you anyhow!”

Infinity's not a number—"always" is eternity.

Enduring is a now.

"Wherever anything lives, there is, open somewhere, a register in which time is being inscribed."—Henri Bergson

Sunday, January 4, 2026