Relative Dimension

1. Screw it. I'm test-driving a new style (and after all that redecorating I did). I have to change my icons every three months or so, but I can keep the same blog style for a year and a half. Go figure. (And, hell, it's not like anybody ever VISITS this thing anyway.)

2. I have recently, and quite suddenly, started to come to terms with the world. I don't like it any more than I did, really, but it sort of sunk in that humanity really hasn't changed in the last few thousand years or so, and won't, in all likelihood, any time soon. Not unless some major event happens from an outside force. Maybe not even then; we're an obstinate lot, humans. I think I'd like to do a video someday of stuff that's happened in the last hundred/thousand years or so, and call it The World.

3. I'll have HOMEWORK in nine days. Gah.

4. With any luck my brain will start working again soon.

5. I'm freaking cold these days, and I forgot how to sleep.


(Atlantis starts, like, two weeks from yesterday. I think.)

gratuitous poetryspam

The Death of Allegory

I am wondering what became of all those tall abstractions
that used to pose, robed and statuesque, in paintings
and parade about on the pages of the Renaissance
displaying their capital leters like license plates.

Truth cantering on a powerful horse,
Chastity, eyes downcast, fluttering with veils.
Each one was marble come to life, a thought in a coat,
Courtesy bowing with one hand always extended,

Villainy sharpening an instrument behind a wall,
Reason with her crown and Constancy alert behind a helm.
They are all retired now, consigned to a Florida for tropes.
Justice is there standing by an open refrigerator.

Valor lies in bed listening to the rain.
Even Death has nothing to do but mend his cloak and hood,
and all their props are locked away in a warehouse,
hourglasses, globes, blindfolds, and shackles.

Even if you called them back, there are no places left
for them to go, no Garden of Mirth or Bower of Bliss.
The Valley of Forgiveness is lined with condominiums
and chain saws are howling in the Forest of Despair.

Here on the table near the window is a vase of peonies
and next to it black binoculars and a money clip,
exactly the kind of thing we now prefer,
objects that sit quietly on a line in lower case,

themselves and nothing more, a wheelbarrow,
an empty mailbox, a razor blade resting in a glass ashtray.
As for the others, the great ideas on horseback
and the long-haired virtues in embroidered gowns,

it looks as though they have traveled down
that road you see on the final page of storybooks,
the one that winds up a green hillside and disappears
into an unseen valley where everyone must be fast asleep.

-Billy Collins