Another limerick

There once was a newly-hatched drake

Who was told to go jump in a lake

Though he flew like a pro

Ever since the word go

His swim lessons didn't quite take

A bit of a thing, after a long while

Every creature that ever will live
Needs experience, cumulative.
Be it ever so humble,
Still, on they must fumble
'Till there are no f*cks left to give.

Waking Dreams

I've always had a lot of trouble with the basic act of going to sleep at night. This is because I have trouble stopping myself from thinking. I think very tangentially, and therefore continuously. The unchecked stream of consciousness, as it were, often makes it impossible for me to relax beyond a certain lower limit. So, most nights, I simply read or write or play games until I'm literally too tired to think, too tired to do anything but sleep. As a matter of fact, I'm writing this just after staying up playing Brink (an odd and slipshod, yet satisfying game) until around 2:00 on Friday night, knowing that I have the opportunity to wear myself down completely and then have a commensurately huge sleep-in... around noon should do the trick. My mental fortitude hadn't been broken down enough by the time I turned in out of physical tiredness, though. That's why I'm blogging. 

What keeps you up at night? The situation in the middle east? Your lover? Physical pain? Hunger? Your city's noise or light pollution? Existential crisis? The baying and cackling of bloodthirsty hyenas in the bush?

For me, it's usually just an obsessive reviewing of the events of the day - which I'm supposed to be doing automatically during dreams. My actual dreams are seldom everyday events, not overtly anyway - they mainly consist of outlandish panic-filled scenarios of missing or botching classes and appointments, or when I've been in a good mood, levitation or outright flying. (Also, the Deep Old Ones occasionally try to pester me, but I sleep with an Amulet of Warding whenever I remember, so no big deal.)

In any case, what I mostly think about while I'm still awake are the hard questions about myself, as opposed to more general philosophical appraisals of humanity, life on Earth, the universe, etc, though they can always crop up as sidebars and tangents. 

I would elaborate, but it looks like I've achieved what I set out to - my blain is finally beginning to surrendr its bustling business and allow me to sleqiu23wubn8gh lo;k'

Tigers of London, a poem that's more of a story

Tigers of London

Max D’Ambrosio

Once, when we were riding our newly captured tigers

Down the drained bed of the Thames,

My best girl Methuseline told me

That London used to contain more people than tigers!

An absurd proposition, since it is clear

That though man may resist them, the beasts have always been

The dominant species of this desolate world,

Overgrown and blanketed as it is with the orange and black stalks

Of the tigerweed

Not to mention the armies of the Tigerlord Mountebank

Who, unlike the wild tigers we’re capable of catching,

Would never cave in

To the craven contrivances of humanity

To threats against captive kittens

Or even to the extract

Of the sacred nepeta plant

The Nip of Cats

Round which even the tigerweed dares not grow

But not out of fear of euphoric convulsions –

Such fatal temptation is resisted through respect

For their lord, and for his dread enforcer

The Weretiger

Who stalks the rooftops round Regent’s Park

A beast with the body of a tiger

And the pants of a man

There are no more domestic cats,

And no dogs of any kind, for obvious reasons

Not since the fall of Buckingham Fortress

The human stronghold of the Rebellion’s golden years

Now a mere mangled mess, and Mountebank’s mauling grounds

Marked by the masticated mountains of murdered men

And the mounted skulls of their massacred mutts and moggies

But a few feral strays have survived the Hobbesian feeding frenzy,

Hacked up like a hairball from the throat of war

Strong among cats of the past,

Weak among denizens of the ruins of London

A contradiction and a rarity, valued

For their tiger-like pheromones

Preyed upon, skinned, stripped of their most private glands

And worn as smelly, tiger-repelling armour,

Coarse, greasy curtains on a window looking in on

The weakness of mammalian hearts

But of course, Methuseline should’ve known all this already

Though she’s a spoiled child of the Post-Buckingham Baby Boom

Born two years after the traumatic and turbulent time

Of the Weretiger Tragedy

Which I tolerated as a toddler

In that time of terror, she might even have been killed

By her parents, just because

She had orange hair

Still, I expected her to know the ways of the world. After all,

We had just then returned from the Battle of Downing Street!

Yet her happy naiveté reminds me

Of myself, long ago, when I asked with wide eyes

“Mother, why don’t tigers let us ride them

When we aren’t wearing oily cat-skin jerkins?”

Meanwhile, my mother’s blue-ribbon tigress (whose name was Titania)

Shrugged off the spell, letting it slide

Off of her quizzically tilted head

As she overheard my careless words,

Embarrassment, rage, and a low growl rising

From her maw, which was muzzled

But not manacled and chained

Any tiger would kill to learn what she knew,

And she aimed to kill her way out of our camp,

But we managed to save ourselves

Soothingly stroking her stripes and

Sapping her savage self-importance

With the shaman’s latest potion

Filtered frappe of feminine feline follicles

And a spoonful of honeyed words

To help the medicine down

‘Til she was put down

By unanimous vote, bar one: my mother’s

For as I learned my lesson,

She unlearned hers

And I succeeded her as chieftain

Inheriting the resolve she lost

To Titania’s termination

So I tell my best girl Methuseline

As we trail off down the trench of the Thames:

Across the stratified, stripy tail of history

Such lessons repeat themselves

The Other reveal themselves

And neither side can be truly free

We find, in time, that the enemy

Can be tamed, transformed, temporarily

But won’t change their colours

Won’t cease to be

Orange and black and red all over

The Tigers of the Post-Apocalypse

The Tigers of London

Setting Up

At the risk of being cliche, I have to ask: why are we alive? I mean that in the sense of "what's the meaning of each of our individual lives," and also in the sense of "why does humanity at large exist." Why are we alive, why do we continue to live, and why the hell do I feel the need to ask this?
However you phrase it, it's a good question, or collection of questions. It's like a massive cave whose topmost tunnels have been explored thoroughly over thousands of years of human history, but which still holds untold depths to be plumbed. Maybe that's why everyone seems to view it as an overly obvious or useless pursuit - a problem that seems important at first glance, but which only fools attempt to solve. The very nature of the question makes it incredibly difficult to recognize a "correct" answer.
Ultimately though, aside from the people who believe that they already know, we all want to find that answer, and that's reason enough not to give up on it just because it seems futile at the moment. There are still serious, educated, determined people that are attempting to solve this problem as we speak. So why don't average people think about it and talk about it way more often? By "average," I mean people who don't make a career or even a hobby out of philosophy. I suppose what I'm asking is, why isn't philosophy considered a hobby for the entire human race?
You may be aware of the popular perception of philosophy as being the sole property of pretentious preppies and post-secondary posers (people who are far less likely to derive pleasure from the simple act of accidental alliteration). Is that all that's stopping people from thinking about those questions regularly, and not just when they're in college or having their midlife crisis?
Personally I think about it constantly. Sometimes, I think it's literally driving me insane. I don't know whether I'm on a downward spiral into madness or an upward spiral into reality-transcending knowledge. It might even turn out that I'm just being humorously melodramatic. In all of these cases, the results would be similarly mind-bending, earth-shattering, perhaps even chthonic. Now you have been warned (OoooOOOoooh!) and are prepared to choose: stop reading, or follow me along the spiral.

Where am I going?
Crazy.
Want to come?

First! (Dibs! Shotgun! etc)

Wow, I get to be first at posting on something... my own blog.

This is a relatively old poem of mine which boasts my first use of the title "Spiral Road." I don't normally write poems at all, more short fiction, but this one's theme/subject matter seems appropriate for getting things rolling.



Spiral Road


by Max D'Ambrosio

The Helix woven through us wakes

And scents the flowing line. Observe:

Affinity for all that’s curved

Along the path the Spiral takes

The path ahead is broad and smooth

Meandering roots in parallel

Where either route will serve you well

Like tour guides in the Louvre

And as the warmth and wonder flow

We think that it’s the happy middle

Though our doubts can always whittle

At the base of Spiral Road

It branches off and spreads new wings

The curling split-hairs flying free

A fine engraving of a tree

Depicted at the birth of Spring

And on this tree we are the vines

Some are leaves and some are runners

Forging forward past the Summer

Leaving leaves in safer climes

In places where the change is slow

And rarely can be truly free

Natural though it may be

For those more keen to grow

We find our handholds on the slope

And coil our fingers round them fast

To stop our Fall into the past

And probe ahead in stubborn hope

With Winter waiting, far a-field

But pushing at us from behind

Though sometimes out of sight and mind

An old wound, long since healed

As all turns gold and orange, then grey

With violent, lusty, rusty hues,

But knowing this, we all still choose

To scramble onward anyway

Such scar-lines are familiar to

All creatures that use chromosomes

To merge or separate their homes

Unite, then split in two

And yet, the trails that we all follow

Often lead toward dead-ends

We’re told by smug, insistent friends

That death is best, the journey hollow

Stories told by brutish men

Who tempt the young with song and dance

To follow them, and take the chance

That glory waits for them

As necrophilia dodges censure,

Never asking “what” or “why,”

We’d rather stare into the sky

And say it holds the answer

We should still look there, to be sure

But truth’s more likely to be found

By searching side-to-side, or down

Despite the clouds’ allure

To branches reaching for the sun

Neglecting water from below

And either side, where neighbours grow

Distinct as trees – as forest, one

One world, from one great line of code

Yet broken into curves and rings

The trunks of trees cut down in Spring

All diagrammed by Spiral Road