‘If only I could make the Whole World great again!
Make it pure, pristine, and airless like the moon!
Make the continents and teeming oceans great!
Rid their surfaces and depths of all things living!
Wait. I’ve got the power now. I can!’
(possible candidate for inclusion in work in progress CALIGULA UNBOUND)
‘What kind of wolf are you?’
‘I wish a were.’
‘Are you speaking grit,’ the gyring gorgon asked,
‘or subjugating us to the subjunctive?’
‘A were-wolf!’ whined the wolf whelp warily watching
the gyring gorgon’s garter-snake coiffure.
‘Why aren’t you venomous? Why am I not stone?’
‘Because we’re euro versions of old Europe,
defanged from funnelling finance to the Greeks,’
she fumed. She furrowed fang-scarred brow. She sat.
The whelp drew courage from that, and drew near.
It drew a Druid symbol in the sand.
It asked, ‘If we revert can I be dire?’
The gorgon hesitated, hissed green hairspray
at a spit-curl serpent forelock going astray.
She sighed, ‘Frankly, we must all now hang together.’
‘Surely Franklin,’ nit-picked pedantically the wolf.
‘Assuredly, we all hang separately
on every common interest we debate.’
Each regards the other, seeing nothing
they have in common, saving comedies
of errors, and they exit. Curtains. War.
We dance across wet grass to Steely Dan.
We slip, back slide, and pirouette again
to the sounds of summer in a sultry town,
to rhythms lost to boogie-woogie blues.
Back when you read this poem (or didn’t, it does not matter),
did its title take your thoughts that bit to Walden?
For extra credit, make a pun combining ‘scalding’
with solutions to any resemblance to a hatter
whom the poem’s protagonist cheated, and was it his balding
that sent him out for a duck? Was he a batter?
To do well on this test, write long and dense-
ly, taking care to let no phrase make sense.
Earth Tourist 