Settembrini’s cold September
A Mediterranean shivering on the brink of Davos
Norkay might’ve had a suggestion
But he never got the byline

The rendering plant cascades into the saltmarsh
The burrowing worms carouse in the windfall
Or shall we say waterfall
Or shall we say fatfall

But the little copepods can’t cope
With the bounteous boon
More adept at particulate matter
Than at semi-emulsified globules

Boileau would have hated that
Semi-emulsified
But simultaneous beauty and truth
Is a tough act to swallow

The Encyclopedia of Suffering
Never completed scarcely begun
Knowledge unstoppable
Goes without saying

The obviously obvious glut of sorrow
The arcane allusion
The pictures in the media
The secret silent injury

Or is it just that one breath
Cannot accommodate
Both the genetic behavior of low places
And the hyper-cognitive high

Little Hans must go down
Go down and die
In the trenches of war
Dug out to evade the lofty projectiles