Under the familiar weight
Of winter, conscience and the State,
In loose formations of good cheer,
Love, language, loneliness and fear,
Towards the habits of next year,
Along the streets the people flow,
Singing or sighing as they go:
Exalte, piano, or in doubt,
All our reflections turn about
A common meditative norm,
Retrenchment, Sacrifice, Reform.
Have fun! Be safe! Enjoy!
Make sure you have a designated driver! Or, better yet … why not be the designated driver? What better way to spend the first hours of 2019 than as a hero to the people around you (maybe not the hero that Gotham deserves, but the hero it needs right now)?
I’m not sure how I’ve gotten to become such a mother hen in my old age … Maybe it’s because, in my younger days, I was the one who needed mother henning.
Whatever, just don’t wind up like Gatsby, floating face down in the pool at the end of the night. (But go ahead and totally be him up until that point.)
Postscript — the quote below, which I rather like, doesn’t appear in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby” or its 2013 film treatment with Leonardo DiCaprio. I’m told that the line actually originates from “Sex and the City” (1998 – 2004).
Oil on canvas.
The (entirely invisible) creatures need incredible illusions to provoke their prey to kill themselves, and the creatures never exhibit any physical prowess of their own. (Their victims are never so much as scratched or bitten by the monsters themselves.)
Maybe that’s because they have no teeth, claws, strength, etc. Maybe they’re as fragile as baby fawns, which is why they must rely on such a unique method of attack.
It would be nuts if a future film or book sequel saw a single immune human just kicking them over like a drunk college kid out tipping cows.
Even better would be if someone suffered a traumatic brain injury during the chaos of the invasion — harming their visual cortex, and rendering them unable to process any visual information. They’d have huge vulnerabilities resulting from this new disability, but also a practically messianic power to save everyone.
(I think too much about movies when I need to do laundry, in other words.)
Today’s agenda — help my fellow Greeks breach Troy’s defenses by constructing a vast, hollow wooden replica of my head and having them hide within it.
CALL IT THE TROJAN DORK.
DC Comics.
Oil on canvas.
If dystopian or post-apocalyptic poetry is what your holiday season needs, then do stop by The Bees Are Dead. There you can find “Survival of the Fittest,” by Howard Debs; “ID,” by Duane Voorhees; and even a poem by that Eric Nolan guy (though, if you ask me, his stuff is strictly derivative).
Happy Holidays!
Photo credit: “Birth Machine,” by H.R. Giger. Ojw [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.
I am unable to determine the artist for this cover, the publisher, or even the issue’s date. My best guess is that artist Arthur Mather designed the cover for Atlas Publications in Australia in the 1950’s.
Eric Robert Nolan, Author 