Category Archive: PETER’S WRITING
Rodent and Firefly
Euclid (the other one) by Domenico Maroli, 1650s
St. Peter: How came you to be down there. Sir Alfred Ayer: You mean in Logical Positivism’s chair? St. Peter: And generally in such infernal spot. Sir Alfred: Specifically, it is a seat best known as hot- However, others burn intensely for theirs it’s not. St. Peter: Bertrand Russell, Berkeley, Hume and Wittgenstein, you mean? Sir Alfred: Precisely and many others now not read or seen. Daubed with the mud of metaphysics, you can see where they’ve been; Off verifying nonsense, their minds are not clean. St. Peter: And why are you in the Seventh Circle? Sir Alfred: I thought…
Continue Reading →Bluebeard
There lived a cold unloving man who dwelt alone in castle walls But tension worthy of a clan kept him company under a high-strung roof. Dreading women, loving battle and the hunt, A Bluebeard; frightened of, frightening children. His cellar stocked with vintage wine and bodies of the loved ones Who knew too late the fate that came of knowing him: Tied to sterile dreams, fated to form an empty vessel, Drained of all emotion, drunk by a leech’s thirst. Speed is of the essence, there’s no time to catch a breath, Hurtling deathwards with precision; He keeps the past…
Continue Reading →Straggler
"Isle of the Dead" by Arnold Böcklin (1880)
He felt he had lost the edge, Somewhere along the way. He thought he could only improve, That his powers were permanent, But he badly misjudged his talents And the transient mood of the throng, Woke to find he had lost the edge, Somewhere along the way. So he glanced more sharply, more often At the image growing closer before him; Rubbed the surface of the mirror with vigor, To gain clarity of perception, But with deep disappointment, he realized That the portrait grew ever still fainter, One day it would blacken and vanish, Somewhere along the way.
Continue Reading →“Outrageous”
Portrait of artist as young man
A self-Review of “Tranquility”; addendum & apologia “What are this?” Seven is a boy in crisis. He’s had a revelation and laments to his ‘friends’ the prevailing cruelty and loss of faith. Meanwhile, a memoir surfaces in which a decadent Hungarian strangles everyone in sight To: “What is it about?” we plead that the synoptic process induces more headaches than the creative one. However, on behalf of the projected readership, here lies a weird and repellant comic yarn rendered as an indulgent memoir, melded with a gentle pastoral revelation. Tranquility is thus a novel of twinned stories, running in thematic…
Continue Reading →The Lonely Critic Laments
'The Critic' by Allen Robert Branston (1817) (Wikimedia Commons Images)
I sense the ending, lack the script, A familiar story’s meaning stripp’d, Of what and when and who and how Whatever, I want the ending now. I go to shows and realize The makers of them do despise Their customers; ’tis crystal clear Mammon not art, is worshipp’d here. But have I miss’d a salient point? Got it wrong, destroy’d the joint? Confounded meaning with the clear Unconscious cause of being here? Art is always doomed to flunk. From highest brow to utter junk, Through countless, low, fun-free travails To rare, derided, epic fails And as…
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