Many Happy Returns, Max!

Variations on Coco Chanel's little black dress, or LBD, "Chanel: The Legend" exhibition, Kunstmuseum, The Hague, 2014

Today you share a birthday with Janis Joplin, Edgar Allan Poe, and Dōgen,

Founder of the Sōtō school of Zen,

And likewise with Robert E. Lee and Dolly Parton.

You knew all that when you were ten!

But take another look at those partyers (some men):

• The Lord never bought Janis a Mercedes-Benz;

• Coco Chanel claimed Dolly (no LBD!!) lacked fashion sense;

• Lee's great victory at Chancellorsville was a debacle;

• The House of Usher, unfortunately, fell;

• And Dōgen lost his bucket down a well.

Such were the ragtag rewards of Fame

For birthday girls and boys in all but name.

If she thus treats her chosen few

What are the rest of us to do?*

There's little consolation in this sample;

Your birthmates set a bad example!

Don't do what Dōgen recommended

And meditate on nothing, but on self,

To which the cosmos lies extended

In all its cockamamie wealth!

*Cf. Samuel Hoffenstein:

"Well, if such as these could be

So foredoomed to misery,

And Fate despise her own elect—

What the deuce do you expect?"

Monday, January 19, 2026

In tenebris lux

This is the way the world ends 

Not with a bang but a whimper.

—T. S. Eliot, “The Hollow Men”

And the light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not.

—John 1:5

A bad poem, the source of those much-quoted lines

Worlds after all end uncounted times

And bangs and whimpers serve to furnish rhymes

Impossible to tell what future a fate mimes

The higher one gets the faster one climbs

Our allergies prevent reading all the latest signs

No telling on what flesh a final human dines

(washed down doubtless with the choicest wines)

We live today in a kind of prequel

Whose burden is a heart that rends

Yes, this may be the way this world ends

But after just deserts, there’s a sequel . . .

Sunday, January 18, 2026

In Māyā's Sock Drawer

“The mind is not a part of the world. It is the whole.”

— Erwin Schrödinger

Schrödinger's cat purrs in his box,

Cuddling up to Māyā's duvet,

Kneads the comforter with her paws,

While somewhere near, a final say

Knocks on virtual quantum doors.

Cats may think they'll live forever,

Humans suppose—that's not clever!

A cat's smarter than the worn-out phone

That sits in Māyā's sock drawer at home,

Lying there dumb, no more to roam.

No phone is dumber than a man

Who screws things up because he can;

Or woman wishing that she had more

Assorted junk from a cosmetic store;

Or person of indeterminate gender

Bent on a soliptical sexual bender.

Gurus surmise that we're all One

If so, I ask you, where’s the fun—

Unless the One comes down to many

Monads dancing, ten a penny?

Saturday, January 17, 2026