He made metalanguage of his own metalanguage and therefore had long since distanced himself from us, behold, he lived in the limbo of a virtual athenaeum and there sprinkled with letters and meanings the dough of bread-word that he consumed in the semantic fever of his post-erudite routine. From above, he saw that the world was collapsing for the lack of reason to live, people banging heads in search of the meaning of life without knowing that they were banging heads in search of the meaning of life. Never will I return to the infamous hall of commonplace, he said. I live here where the language beast lives, and there isn't a day that I don't sacrifice a little sanity for the sake of lexical adventures, he said. Tomorrow I discover that time as well as grammar can expand, that space is elastic and the verb dominates everything, he said. For now, the soap opera of daily human life and its stupid rush towards nothingness is enough for me, he thought. Then he closed one of his books and the world went dark. He smoothed his hair with one hand and with the other pointed at a cloud in the sky. - Hey cloud, I'm catching you, he said already hovering over this metaphor.
Immortality looking invincible,
Athena's arpon arsing shadows,
Amazonite unfading Athenaeum species,
A lasting blade for an immortal legacies,
Fallacies befall the inconsistencies,
Fragrances crash the inconveniences...
Extinction of lives is overturned by heavenly bliss,
Angels are guardian spirits,
Humanity is saved,
Hell is dead.
Karl Marx house in Trier.
Know you where it is,
Abode of wisdom today we live,
Renown for industrial change?
Labour unite...still remember the say?
Man! It is a place to be,
Athenaeum of global change,
Rare to find in somewhere else,
X-rays of wars on man and growth.
Herein philosophy lived,
On the table under the tree he wrote,
Uniform of the legend intact in’robe,
Spoons and forks that fed the brain,
Excellent works of yester years.
In the anthology photos speak;
No to exploitation is all they say.
This environment beauty to behold,
Roman empire relics here and there;
In Karl Marx house in Trier,
Eyes have many to learn:
Respectable mount of thought.
She walked into my universe
silently as her lovely smile.
Rarely such beauty is preserved
Bar, perhaps, a Grecian profile:
some alabaster sculptured head
Cold, soulless in a museum
Of a venerable Greek, long dead;
Or maybe an athenaeum
Where I have found her while reading
Looking down at me in the silence
from a vast book-laden shelving.
I overcame my ambivalence
When her face appeared before me
a visage, smiling demurely.
He left portraits of six presidents
And of several of their wives.
His brush lent depth and reality
To these ever famous lives.
His works grace great museums
And hang on mansion walls.
They're seen in the White House and Capitol
And in state governmental halls.
His most famous painting is unfinished,
You'll find it on the dollar bill.
We recognize George Washington's face
Because of this artist's skill.
The Boston Museum of Fine Arts
Placed it proudly on display,
His original of "The Athenaeum".
It is hanging there today.
Artist -- Gilbert Stuart 1755-1828
For Brian Strand's contest Picture This
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