and now, i too, can jest, waving the brick,
the 20th century's Odyssey,
so too Ulysses, father of, this cantos poet,
it's a well worn book,
to make books like leather, the older
the better, lost the colt stink of freshly
peeled, leather rather than fur,
so too, i, can now close the book and leave
it's ancestry in lost conversation among
the living in cafés and pubs,
so now i can give you a bewilderment i too
am aware of: the chaos of kept Latin
geometrics, style, indeed orthography with
accent here and there, but to dwell on
the past like that, per se, prae se or any such
coercion to disregard the general public,
no surprises with such a pompous raucous,
elephants and stilettos, mass and weight,
bouncing on the moon, the sheer chaos
of how the barbarians lost runes and incorporated
the gaps, i.e.: a, e, o, p, R, b, B, Q, g, d...
                       with Hindu 0, 9, 8, 6, 4...
or as Arabs say: our ten commandments.
but still the chaos, once meaningful now meaningless,
hence programming, encoding, data structuring,
fish tanks think tanks, and SLANG, or SHLANG
as i call it, impromptu youth too cool for school:
still don't know what you're talking about...
the lettering survived because their arithmetic
that gave us beauty like the Coliseum and marble
testicles (later missing with castrato hosanna
in excelsis deo - o took a baritone stance) -
the fall of the Roman empire? all due to
                      I + VI = VII
                      XI + V = XVI.
                                               everyone was like... huh?
can you really **** around with these symbols
in modern physics and mathematics?
... no thanks... we'll keep the alphabet but bring
you down on your mathematics...
but have you seen the Appleton Tower in
Edinburgh? or the library in George Sq.?
you haven't... both are hardly Islamic mosaics and
minarets. as many curves and glitches of beauty
as the models on a catwalk during London's fashion week;
anorexic imagination: keep it square and bony,
me and my godforsaken x-ray vision.
so suma summarum:
it began with: and then went down to the ship...
but ended up with the ship being a gondola
i.e. you in the dinghy (piccioletta) astern there!
i'm not even going to read the drafts & fragments
section (CX - CXVII - C X C V - or the curriculum vitae).