As kids every couple of weeks
we’d take our allowances,
go down to the variety store
and buy the latest DC comic.
Larry and I would spend
that afternoon imagining
we were whatever superhero
was featured in our new,
and now most prized book.
Jimmy was with us
all the way, but admitted
he wanted to be Lex Luthor or
or the Joker, or better still
Solomon Grundy.
So we probably should not
have been surprised that
while I became a lawyer
and Larry a classics professor,
Jimmy became a politician.
I have decided it is now time
and I am establishing a new
field of study that blends
mathematics and political science,
which I have named idiometry.
Simply put, idiometry allows one
to measure just how close one can
take the statements or promises
if any politician and square
them with the actual facts.
Then you repeat this for all
of the statements of that politician
and you inevitably find the square
unattainable, there simply are
no perfect squares yet achieved
in idiometry, for no politician
ever seen on a public stage
hews perfectly to facts, always
veering off into self interest
or blatant ideology, so perhaps
idiometry isn’t worth it, telling us
what we already knew full well.
Imagine, for just a moment,
you have become a crow.
You know that you will be
detested by most eventually,
your voice despised by all
who are forced to hear it.
And while you can fly, you
know you won’t be more
welcome regardless of where
you choose to land.
If you cannot imagine this,
then imagine you have
become a politician,
for that will, for you, prove
to be much the same
as crowhood, the biggest
difference being your new
need to grovel before all,
because the loss of that job
would be an unbearable state.
My ultimate goal, never to be achieved
is to redesign hell and all of its circles
to better reflect the world we live in now.
Of course I’d need two circles for
politicians, one for each major party,
and independents get to choose.
Catholic priests, minister and rabbis
who abused members of their flocks
get a circle of their own with the movie
Dogma playing in an endless loop.
There would be all the usual circles
for the those whose lives fell short
and one for Buddhists. Imagine
a run down Motel 6 in the worst possible
neighborhood, since they will only
stay until their reincarnation as
something truly ghastly and detested.
Those would be my desirables, but
the one certainty, the absolute is
the worst of all, set aside for those
who spent untold hours toiling
to write catchy but ever so vapid, cloying
melodies and lyrics that become stuck
in your mind like an intractable fungus.
First Published in AGON Journal, Issue 0, 2021
As I have aged, I hope
I have gotten smarter
or at least more able
to adapt to life’s issues.
But there are still areas
where knowledge fails,
where you cannot hope
to attain what you want.
World peace is one such,
honest politicians another,
and the list could go on
but you get the picture.
The ultimate failure however
is imagining that you can get
Adobe or Microsoft programs
to do what you want and need.
My first inclination, in fact
my strong desire, when he asks me
what time it is, is not to consult
my watch, but to say that we live
in an age of unprecedented uncertainty,
an era of division and incivility,
and days fraught with risk that
each might be the last.
I know he wants to know the hour
and the minute, but if he is late,
the moment wasted in knowing
just how much so merely adds
marginally to the problem.
And if the question lacks
that import to him, then time
is no more than a human construct,
malleable despite our demand
of rigidity, and subject to
the whims of Popes and politicians,
and all the rest of nature
can only marvel at our absurdity.
an old writer and his words 