Evening The evening slowly dons the changing clothes a rim of ancient trees holds out for it; and as you watch, before you two lands separate, one travelling heavenwards and one which falls; and leave you fully part of neither one, not quite so darkly silent as the house, not quite so surely summoning eternity... Continue Reading →
New Rome bus routes
This is the third time this has happened to me. I open the Rome bus app (Roma Bus), click on the tab to check the route of a bus (it was the 32 this time) and a screen appears with a map of a large part of North-West Africa. Are there secret bus routes running... Continue Reading →
The World is Big
Listen to the poem here The world is big but I would like it bigger still, more different not less. Maps show that there’s still room for one large island or small continent. Within, let us suppose, a people with another calendar, new names for stars, and constellations patterned on the shapes of animals and... Continue Reading →
Aesthetics is …
"Aesthetics is to artists as ornithology is to birds" Barnett Newman
Walking near the Roman Forum
Listen to the poem here Below, next to our feet, the present just about to turn into the past. The plastic bottles, and the beer cans from last night. The cigarette butts impacted in between the cobble stones And next to them the newly sprouted seedlings thrusting upwards like minute berserkers insanely charging our enormous... Continue Reading →
Flann O’Brien’s Book Handling Enterprise
Flann O’Brien was a pen name of Brian O’Nolan, an Irish author who is most famous for three novels, At Swim Two Birds, The Third Policeman and the Dalkey Archive. He also wrote a column for the Irish Times from 1940 to 1966 full of wild imaginings. I once read an anthology of his Irish... Continue Reading →
Sillygism
Forests are large collections of trees All trees have barks Forests are very noisy places
Is it a duck? Is it a monkey? Is it a dog? No it’s @
Recently, I chanced upon a page in Wikipedia entitled “At sign”. It contains a long list of the names which @ has in various languages. It is quite amazing that one sign can have been interpreted in so many different ways. Here is a selection (some of the names listed are not reported as... Continue Reading →
An alternative Napoleon
In our universe, Genoa ceded the island of Corsica to France in 1768. Napoleone Buonaparte was thus born in 1769 as a subject of the King of France. (Later he changed his name to Napoleon Bonaparte to make it sound more French). Napoleon was sent to a French military academy, graduated as an artillery... Continue Reading →
The winter starlings
© Photo Copyright Walter Baxter Listen to the poem here In early winter every year the starlings in their hundred thousands come to Rome. They populate the branches of the trees from where their shit rains down in abundance and unceasingly. Umbrellas must be opened as you rush across the road, weathering their excremental storm. They... Continue Reading →