Dr. Shandy Calling*

ON GOOGLE did our Dr. Shandy
A lusty pleasure-blog decree:
Where Words, like sacred rivers, ran,
Through revelations [man measuring man]—
Twittered down for all to see.

Yes, twice three posts on risky ground
Were memories and facts muddled round:
And the Objects -- rich with old school rills,

Blossomed into an opera the world would see;
Our hometown? [Backwards as the hills!],
Unfolding intersections, most colorful tapestry.

But, oh! that mean professional chasm which planted,
‘Round her ivory tower, a tainted theorist’s cover!
A savage place! as evilly enchanted
As e'er beneath that mountainside was haunted
By woman wailing for log ago dissertation-advisor!
And from this chasm, with senseless academic seething,
As if this campus in entitled patriarchy were breathing,
A mighty creativity potently was forced:
Amid whose online half-Internet’d burst
Huge ideas vaulted like reclaimed mail,
Or like a Floridian’s ‘flock o’seagulls’ flail:
And 'mid these frantic emails, at once and ever,
It flung up [humbly] some sacred words.
Rhetoric meandering with a lazy motion;
Through mountains and swamps the sacred ideas ran,
Then reached their blogs -- those measured man by man,
And soon left in anonymity – lost inside a lifeless Web:
Then, 'mid this tumult, Shandy had an epiphany:
Intersecting voices? A private polyphony!

The value of the blog of pleasure?
Creativity as it flowed from fountains!
Where she wrote their mingled measure,
From the swamps to the mountains.
‘Twas was a miracle of rare device,
A witty pleasure-blog: ‘twould suffice!

A lawyer with a blog
In a vision once I saw:
It was an complex experiment:
A wayward career he’d supplement --
Writing from the Life he'd Lived.
Would that it would renew within me,
[A world left far away and oh, so long!],
To such a deep delight 'twould win me?
That technology offered a lost song,
But, could I create a blog from air?
Those witty words! A new rhetorical device!
That all who heard should read it there,
And all would cry, “Bravo! Bravo!
Her brilliant stance, her willingness to dare!”
I’ll weave my tapestry 'round you thrice,
You’ll close your eyes -- no longer dread,
On Shandy's life blood now be fed
And, I hope, enjoy my corner of Paradise.

-- Dr. T. Shandy (In the Cause!)

*Originally composed while visiting Xanadu; Coleridge's -- not Olivia Newton John's.