The Year of the Last Useful Invention

The clock of my mind stopped in 1897. it is always late autumn and we dress mostly in grey steam locomotive whistles daily puncture our thought balloons my teacher once said: Boy, consider the rectangle, source of all progress. forty days and forty nights forty shekels and forty cubits and thirty pieces of silver the number of mosquitoes skating on the rain barrel a marching panorama of numbered cards sometimes, a Joker! a fire or a drunken brawl