He was always just recovering from
some shit, talking his way back to
normal, learning to live in
the present and yanking
the stuck parts of himself out from
underneath the deadfall
he’d somehow blundered into
again.

This is a little reminiscence about… oh, no one you know.

Image: apropos of nothing, except per accidens, this image is a copy of a redacted page that the United States Patent & Trademark Office provided in response to a Freedom of Information request about how it came up with its ridiculous trademark mascot, T.Markey. The story of that request and the USPTO’s response is here. I wrote the poem first and then went looking, but now that I think of it, the poem may have been–and may still be, for all I know–at least metaphorically about politics. Or politicians. Or government agencies. Or ludicrous secret-keeping. Or, you know, anything you care to think it’s about–I’m told that’s the way metaphor is supposed to work. Sort of like FOIA rules, apparently, or laws about surveillance: it means anything you think it means, especially if you are the government, which after all made the rules in the first place, am I right? So it’s only fair the government be allowed to interpret them as it chooses.

Oh, and the image, I am reliably informed, is in the public domain as a U.S. government work, categorically unprotectable under U.S. copyright law.