Grimbeau

Think I blew it, yet I just dunno—that’s what happens when you stand, put yourself forward, lay it on the line. There is always a train coming, fast or slow. What makes a good loser then?

A hand-snake and a Simeon smile or the sweet compensation of mere participation. At least it was close. You was not crushed. Tomorrow is yet another day. Fire is a symbol. Hubris is a drudge. Just when you think you’re getting somewhere it bites you big time on the bum.

‘Cover his mouth’, they insist, before the final gorge sprays us all in sap vile, instead we provided pineapple chunks to moisten scabby lips, and prolong the agony for one final heaving lurch, And it is done. In olden days they caved the skull in with stones when the harvests failed. Pity is the most base of all emotions. We wallow in the swamp.

There is a vaccine far away without a city wall, they sing. Round here the white van still is king of the faeries. Up north they are putting up shelves to house commemorative urns. Down here Dido laments white haired waves blown back before the Zoom committee as the Old Greys look in on morphing apps till human voices wake them up to drown in the incredible.

A free land hopeless and divided. Rancorous divisions between bookish Bostonians and Robes-pierrots; pearl barley devos and childish prodigies; blank cartridges and Aaron Burr littering up the federacy of dung beetles—a proud, eventful history of all that’s best in human slaughter in the mechanized age endangered. And then a sullen rentier assumes the right to legislate for honesty! This is a bold country for old men and algorithms.

Sundown, Theodosia, will never be the same without the plankton of your tears. I head for Alabama with my banjo on my knee first light. We may never see my like again

Don’t bank on it Aaron, there’s one born every minute.