Childe Donald to the Dark Tower Came

Giorgio de Chirico, The Nostalgia of the Infinite (1912–13)

So, you despise me, Mr Gigadibs.

No deprecation, – nay, I beg you, sir !

— Browning

The laborer is worthy of his hire,

Though does he get it if that’s really true

As liberal platitudes require? But

No point questioning the choir:

Too many cooks spoil the confounded stew!

We fit our lives into the blighted day,

Confirming what the crackpot hours desire,

Renounce the old—and flabbergast the new!

Envoi

There they stood, ranged along the hill-sides – met

To view the last of me, a living frame

For one more picture! in a sheet of flame

I saw them and I knew them all. And yet

Dauntless the slug-horn to my lips I set,

And blew. “Childe Donald to the Dark Tower came.”

With apologies to Robert Browning, author of this Envoi, aside from one tiny change.

Fumito Ueda, cover image for the European and Japanese versions of the video game Ico (2001)

Flagrante Delicto, Thursday, October 9, 2025

News

In memoriam Tom Clark (pictured here), 1941–2018

. . . mere excursions don't suffice on visits

To dead cities—excavation too's required,

Cries out the hungry unborn poem

Within us, demanding to exist as

If alive

—Tom Clark, "Fidelity"

I never listen to the news!

They say Vitellius is emperor now.

I slept with his daughter Vitellia.

That was before she married Libo Frugi.

Mozart put her in an opera, you know,

Called La Clemenza di Tito—

Something about Yugoslav partisans

In World War Two.

Funny isn't it how we say “slept with”

When we really mean fucked.

In fact, I hardly slept with her. She snores.

And Libo Frugi, what a dick!

I hear Vespasian is emperor now.

Don't ever listen to the news.

Envoi

On a summer evening in 2018,

the poet Tom Clark, who loved baseball,

was struck by a car while crossing a street

in Berkeley; he died the next day.

Good night, sweet prince, and flights of shortstops sing thee to thy rest.

Tuesday, October 7, 2025

Allhallowtide

The graves stood tenantless, and the sheeted dead

Did squeak and gibber in the Roman streets

—Hamlet, act 1, scene 1

Although the dead so seldom drink,

We serve them as we do ourselves,

Those fading proxies for our fears,

Necessary to the revels

Celebrated at Halloween.

My neighbors put out plastic bones,

Which grow in whimsy with the years.

PVC skeletons abound—

Just over there, a polyvinyl

Hound's bones bay at a missing moon!

This Halloween, the shaky ground

Trembles beneath our pricey homes,

And on our phones, the shit-faced dead

Squeak and gibber beside each bed.

Monday, October 6, 2025