"Grief Management for Dummies"

Bitterly flung on the raven currents
These mute words to a gin run mad
Neither increase my malign endurance
Palpably, nor bring peace once said.

Poet of riddles, grimoires & shadows,
Look to the cardboard a beggar wields:
Read if you will of nearer battles
Not to be mentioned by tenured skalds.

Poetry's over; & that's no subject.
How many rtimes will you wake & turn
Back to the dark, in this pyramid Egypt
Hieroglyph-choked & vision-shorn?

09 13 02

"Never be a citizen of anything in which you would not want
to hold shares." --Norman Spinrad, Greenhouse Summer (1999)

"The restaurant band was playing Dixieland Bach..." --ibid
[A few words about this book. The author puts more effort into
creating a couple of interesting characters, & sketching a post-
capitalist society of "citizen-shareholders" in "syndicates", than
in delineating a plausible world for the polar-melted climate that
is all too foreseeable. (His chief enjoyment, from living in Paris
i suppose, is giving that place the climate & culture of present-day
New Orleans--that being, apparently, the only thing Paris now
lacks. I would have rather seen his temperate Siberia...) But it is
important for being one of the few scifi novels to address this
subject, & interestingly, not completely a dystopia or disaster
novel (such as J G Ballard's monumental The Drowned World--).
All the same, i think it is typical of its period in being unable to
imagine the tragedy of a world in which billions of people have
become environmental refugees. You have to go back to literary
novelists of the thirties & forties, to find something that comes
close to what is now required. (Here i insert a blurb for the better
songs of Grunge--& Under the Volcano.)]