Satan Fakes a Bow

Maʿrūf Baghdādī, Angels bowing to Adam, except Iblīs, who refuses. Topkapı Palace Museum, Istanbul, MS Bağdat 282 fol. 16r.

A More Perfect Union

The soul is like a stalactite,

Dripping down from heaven;

The body like a stalagmite,

Arising from the floor.

It takes an eternity to meet,

And then they want no more.

Effecting a more perfect union

Is what it's all about—

This kissing and this weeping,

The fucking and the knout.

Arctodus Pardons Two Hominins

Two or three million years ago

Short-faced bears huffed in these caves,

Dining on Hominini trapped

In limestone corners—growing fat

On termites and the random rat.

On Hominini, these bruins feast

Each fall to show their settled right,

All other claimants now deceased.

Moved, though, by some ancestral fear,

They pardon two of them a year.

Waddle and Gobble are their names

Traditionally—thought demeaning,

By some, whose virtue-signaling games

Have no place in pardoned feeling.

A new nomenclature's form should

Reflect our culture, like it or not.

We must make do with what we’ve got.

Say “Biden” and “Iscariot”?

“Biden,” computer-graphic snow;

“Iscariot,” a sort of battle-

Cruiser name, fit to follow USS.

But for a hominin, it's rot!

An artist’s impression of a newly pardoned hominin (Wikicommons).

On the short-faced bears, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arctodus. Some giant short-faced bears (Arctodus simus) weighed over a ton and could stand eleven feet tall on their hind legs. They went extinct about 13,000 years ago for some reason. No matter how tough you are, you're never tough enough.

The term "bruin" applied to bears is in fact simply Dutch/Low German (and Afrikaans) for "brown," where it is pronounced rather like "brain." Hochdeutsch is, of course, braun, pronounced roughly like the English word.

Skeletal reconstruction of Arctodus simus at the Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto.

Friday, November 28, 2025