Cardboard Critters

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No, it wasn't always thus:

Once writers caught, or missed, the bus.

But AI cannot lie, or, telling truth from fuss,

Distinguish who's dead from what's alive,

The whine that's not from those who dine.

Books for review should get in line.

It's surely time for me to go—

Those cardboard critters will do fine!

Their Booker Prizes will arrive

As fast as DeepSqueak makes it so—

And if they picked the Premium package

A Nobel's perhaps slipped in their baggage.

When Mr. Belvedere rings the bell

Let's just hope he's not from hell!

Backward into the Future

I will tell you what I will do and what I will not do. . . . the only arms I allow myself to use—silence, exile, and cunning.

—James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916)

Pushing up Daisies

"My boy, don't do what the other people do!"—Gurdjieff's grandmother

My own Grannie, between drinks,

lighting a Craven "A" (her favourite brand—I bought them for her) philosophized:

"Die young and make a handsome corpse!"

I didn't take that advice—I took Yiayia Gurdjieff's instead, and three-quarters

of a century later, touch wood, I'm still here, "pushing up daisies," as Grannie Murie put it,

in perspective, but handsomer these days,

or so I hopefully tell myself, than ever.

I knew things that "the others" didn't

—or so it always seemed to me—

which I tried in vain to explain to them.

Even a yawn would have been some kind of affirmation!

None came—perhaps I'd expressed it badly,

although they said I wrote like an angel.

Needless to say, one does the best one can.

And now my native land seems on the brink of ruin.

But then again, when one comes to think of it,

the abyss is a yawn of sorts, wouldn't you say?

February 5, 2025