Crosswalks: The Curse of Croesus
I was born in 1951, the year the world’s first crosswalk was officially installed in Slough, England, where it was known as a zebra crossing. Questions of priority. Walk safely to the zoo my children, and snap your selfies with the eponymous quadruped that once grazed the wide savannah. Slough. To imprison. A state of moral degradation into which one may sink. Go safely children. Cast off that outer skin that is the perfect copy of the serpent from which it came. Beware the muddy ground, the hole filled with mire. A mass of dead tissue on the surface of a wound.
For the rest I am dumb, though if the streaking clouds could speak, such a tale of woe would we hear.
Suits insist the boys in lab coats cry wolf. A shot in the dark. A shell game. The music of chance. The opsonic index and vaccine therapy of pseudodiphtheric otitis.
Tyrian purple. The color of power. The smell of which hovered between rotting shellfish and garlic. The badge of noble youth. Opulence. Excess.
Wildfires. Floods. Thin air. Such stuff as dreams are made on. Pipe dreams. Oil. Unctuous and rich. Slick and sweet. Opulent. The physic of the field become an engine’s lucifer. Light. More light.
Our auto-da-fé. The yellow press. The yellow peril. The sinful implications of a yellow book.
Yellowstone. To micturate in a caldera and spook a spunky bear. Beware. The danger. Do not piss off a ranger.
The boy on the hill. Rounded by sheep. Bored to sleep. There he lies they say. He will not toe the line. Sip your whine, Philistine, and pray. Bird of paradise. Bird of prey.
Know the plane truth. Attempts to fix the landing gear caused the fighter jet to think it was on the ground. At peace. Hot air. Follow your nose, the plane was told. A piece of goods. Noli me tangere.
He met Solon in the Peacock Saloon. Just one for old times’ sake. So back and forth the bottle went, as they recited Shakespeare to a mirror on the wall.
Methoughts I saw a thousand fearful wrecks;
Ten thousand men that fishes gnaw’d upon;
Wedges of gold, great anchors, heaps of pearl,
Inestimable stones, unvalu’d jewels,
All scatter’d in the bottom of the sea.
Some lay in dead men’s skulls, and in the holes
Where eyes did once inhibit, there were crept –
As ‘twere in scorn of eyes – reflecting gems,
That woo’d the slimy bottom of the deep,
And mock’d the dead bones that lay scatter’d by.
(Richard III, Act 1 Scene 4)