P.O.E.T.S. Day pablum first. Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday. That should get your blood going even if you already knew what the acronym stood for. Get out. Get here.

It’s not quite the weekend but it can be if you make it Picardism. Escape the office. Don’t claim anything that’ll come back and bite you, though. Tell your boss you have a raging case of herpes and yeah, you’ll get out of work early but you’ll also never get to double dip a corn chip at the office Christmas party without a full and total realization of what a gossip your boss is. Also, what if your boss is hot? Don’t burn an a bridge unnecessarily.

Better the simple. We all hate a sniffle and COVID has everyone on tenterhooks and there is no “How did the flare up go?” questions around the water cooler on Monday. A fever can be faked with nothing more than a thermometer held near a light bulb, but not too near. I still remember my mom telling me to get dressed for school despite the thermometer registering 110° F. I tried but mom’s are clever.

Back to Poe

Yup. He’s got the rage and misunderstood me-ism that is raging through the Zeitgeist (no idea why I capitalized Zeitgeist – add it to the mystery of who I might conceive myself to be.)

“Alone” is a creepy poem, even from a Baltimore perspective and despite that horror-scape I’ve known decent well-adjusted and at least one infallibly happy person that have existed there.

I should mention that I am possibly full of it with this entry. The creepy poem may or may have not been written by Poe. He was dead when it was first published and there doesn’t seem to be an original. Better yet, the date and title weren’t on the not verifiable maybe original source either. Poestories.com still claims that it is now seen as one of his most revealing works (which adds to the mystery of who we might conceive Poe to be.)

Whatever. It’s a good depressing look at what every goth high schooler with enough money to grab an Excelled leather biker’s jacket and a Moleskin notebook wants to put forth. It’s angst without apology.

Maybe that’s why he didn’t print it. If he wrote it. Obviously somebody did – and, holy crap. This just occurred to me. Did they have Excelled leather biker’s jackets and Moleskin notebooks in antebellum Maryland? This may have been written by an angry teenager.

I’ll look into it. In the meantime, ostensibly by Edgar Allen Poe before his death by either suicide, murder, cholera, hypoglycemia, rabies, syphilis, influenza, or repeated voting (not kidding about that,) I or we as a restaurant entity present, “Alone.”

Alone

By Edgar Allen Poe or Some teenager that had a beef with the Grant administration

From childhood’s hour I have not been

As others were—I have not seen

As others saw—I could not bring

My passions from a common spring—

From the same source I have not taken

My sorrow—I could not awaken

My heart to joy at the same tone—

And all I lov’d—I lov’d alone—

Then—in my childhood—in the dawn

Of a most stormy life—was drawn

From ev’ry depth of good and ill

The mystery which binds me still—

From the torrent, or the fountain—

From the red cliff of the mountain—

From the sun that ’round me roll’d

In its autumn tint of gold—

From the lightning in the sky

As it pass’d me flying by—

From the thunder, and the storm—

And the cloud that took the form

(When the rest of Heaven was blue)

Of a demon in my view—

Get out. Get here. Wine, beer, and all manner of the downfall are at hand.

By the way, those odd dashes in the poem are not from me. He or Megatronic did that intentionally. It’s the text as offered.

One last. In the first line do you have to de-diphthong “hour” to make it work as iambic or am I just an idiot here?