Jack Pelham

Modern man,
Ever the richer
In technology
And convenience,
Has yet found
No way to
Automate either
The maturation
Of his soul
His love for
His fellow man.

There is no limit
To what a man cannot see
When he has got his eyes shut

What did anybody ever gain
By being rash,
Except what might have been
Gained as well by mere and fortunate accident?

When I was a child,
An hour seemed an eternity.

But now, in my mature years,
An hour is nothing,
And the day is the new hour,
And the week, the new day,
And so forth.

And while I do frequently regret the change,
And find the acceleration surprising—
Especially since it took
FOREVER
To climb the steps in my childhood—
I take solace in the expectation
That one of these days,
This rushing slide of time—
Will dump me out
Into the glory
Of that endless moment,
Where—
In a different way—
An hour is nothing.

Could Satan himself—
In all his shining-dark craftiness—
Have devised a plot so sinister
As releasing a software without
Adequate support,
Or a service without
Adequate description?

Great learning seems to be
Made of three things—
Each harder than the one before.

The first is in gathering
The bits and pieces of fact
That anyone can collect
Along the way though life.

The lie and the error
Can be hard to distinguish—
Particularly in their effects.

Funny that the latter is
Universally considered
To be the lesser of the two—
Both as a sin and as a threat—
Though, it seems,
It hurts us more often.

The great backlog of necessity has
Recently become my master—
As I might have reasoned it must
Back when I was doing the procrastinating
That set this present coup into motion.

—

You attack the statue,
Friend,
And the flag
And the street name,
As if lancing the very heart of evil.