When my friend Hugo read Love/Sick, he said it was wonderful.
I’m not very good at taking compliments, so I responded that I’d write a parody of it called Wonder/Fool. He seemed enthusiastic about the idea:
so here it is.
When you first read my blog,
you thought it sounded really smart.
You said you had good taste, and it was yummy.
It gave a beating to your brain
and matched the beating of your heart.
Is it good?
Or are you just a dummy?
My poems were a gateway
to a state of simple bliss.
You said you read and re-read every line.
You couldn’t think of any work
that measured up to this.
Is it good?
Or is it cognitive decline?
When you read my forceful prose,
you cracked right up and had a fit,
abruptly laughed and cried yourself to pieces.
It had you rolling on the floor;
you may have peed yourself a bit.
Is it good?
Or do you get gelastic seizures?
When you first read this stanza,
you were quite beside yourself.
You found this weird recursion really hoopy,
said it put Hofstadter to shame,
and took his books all of your shelf.
Is it good?
Or are you strangely loopy?
To celebrate my work,
you drove a circus through my home.
You said my zeepding fluvacque was meticulous.
You gave me crowns and laurels
made of chopsticks and pink foam.
Is it good?
Or are you just ridiculous?
My œuvre gave you visions;
you heard a choir of angels sing.
You laughed so hard your aura’s glow became unclear.
Your quantum-astral psychics
said I’d be the next big thing.
Is it good?
Of course! The author’s the only sane one here.
I usually look up the nonsense phrases I invent to make sure they don’t mean anything I don’t want them to. I’m not surprised that people are already peddling quantum-astral things, though I kept that particular combination of quackery buzzwords because both look like words that would go before ‘physics’ rather than ‘psychics’.
What surprised me is that zeepding apparently means something in Dutch, which is commonly associated with snot. My Dutch dictionaries only have zeep (soap) and ding (thing) separately, but I’m going to guess that zeepding is a way of saying ‘bubble’ when referring to snot bubbles. I think I’ll keep that word in there.
In case you’re wondering, strange loops are something Douglas Hofstadter talks about in his book Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, which I recommend, along with his later books Le Ton beau de Marot and I Am a Strange Loop.
I’m quite happy to have worked the word ‘gelastic‘ into a poem, since it’s where part of the name ‘Angelastic’ came from.
Creative Output 