Category Archive: PETER’S WRITING
Parody # 7: Welcome to Brigadoon Beach
(with apologies to Matthew Arnold) The air is cool tonight, The tide is low, the ice lies fair In the sea, displacing its mass And the fjords stand, Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay. Come to the window, Greta, sweet is the night air! The Sea of Faith Was once at the full and bore your Yacht, in uttermost luxury, to New York Before the merry flights home. But now I only hear A melancholy, long-withdrawing roar, Beating, echoing with the fading bleats Of a Swedish Doom-Goblin And here we are as at a cocktail circuit,…
Continue Reading →Parody # 6: The Spoodle (Home From the Lab)
(with apologies to R. M. Rilke and his ‘Panther’) His vision, from neurotic genes Has grown so confused it cannot bear Life. It seems to him there is No line, and in his mirror image, no life. As he squeals and rolls his eyes, again He totters on rickety, confected pegs Like the fabricated gait of a wind-up doll In which no sentience occurs. Only at times, the veil lifts Quietly; he sees a dog from the pound, A vague picture forms of real life and love – It clambers through his button eyes, plunges the metal…
Continue Reading →I’m the Man in Brown
(With apologies to Johnny Cash) Well, you wonder why I always dress in brown, Why never smiling white or blackened frown, And why does my visage and my old clothing fade into The background of the noisy hullabaloo? I wear brown for the folks who keep their peace And mind their business and respect police, I wear it for the citizens who behave with charity Not broadcasting from rooftops, noisily; I wear it for the people low on cash, Whose bank accounts and cars are not too flash, For sinners who believe or those who do not…
Continue Reading →Tranquillity, Too: A Revelation
(An Allegory) Behold, he cometh with clouds He had a second rate mind, and his name had been Register Seven. At two o’clock in the morning, after night fill, the infomer-cial for a “fat-free infuser” caused him to get into his zombie-mobile and drive to a window to collect his succulent “Stak-A-Krap.” He could eat that for breakfast, lunch, or dinner; the taste portable, running all over, smelling like a wet dog on a sunny day. So he ended up working there, managing what management called “the dining area.” His diseased yearnings had gotten him into difficulties with earlier jobs….
Continue Reading →Nabokov’s Conundrum
You are doubtless familiar with Poe’s Law: “Satirical expressions of extremism online are hard to distinguish from genuine ones without indicating intent.”* As inventor Nathan Poe put it, in relation to fundamentalist religious belief: “Without a winking smiley or other blatant display of humor, it is utterly impossible to parody a creationist in such a way that someone won’t mistake it for the genuine article.”** But, as usual, the master of English as a second language formulated something even better. Writing about the announcement of Facebook from the terrace of the Montreux Palace in the Spring of 1977, Vladimir Nabokov formulated his…
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