The POTW: Verse Til It Hurts

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POTW #806
(Week of 15 July, 2012)
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A friend of mine recently released an iPad game called "The Big Big Castle," where you stack things up to make gigantic rickety towers that probably fall down. I was playing with it obsessively yesterday, and it got me thinking about this weird motivation that we humans seem to have to take everything to extremes. (One wonders, for example, why a person would still be writing a poem every week after more than sixteen years...)

(Plug: Incidentally, the game is free to play, so if you have an iPad you have nothing to lose but your immortal soul.)

Ode Atop a Big Big Castle

Genetic endemic to humanity
Is compulsive accomplishment vanity
Invention's mother is the vigor
Of personal dreams of big and bigger
Only progressively fulfilled
In the remainder thus we build
According to open-ended plan
As well and as fast and as much as we can
Stacking triumph higher and higher
An incomplete achievement spire
Piling virtue or depravity
Either raises the center of gravity
Growing ever tall and thin
Increasingly subject to tremors and wind
And as kids with blocks have learned
Inevitably collapsed and adjourned
And wisdom might be tempted to explore
If more is better or more is only more

Copyright © 2012 by Dave Grossman

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