Pascal and Me_ Or Dredging up Dread..
While waiting in the cashier’s line
At The Golden Bear’s Bookshop
Piles of UC course catalogues
Beckoned to me with
The promise of a shiny new language
With its armor of Imperative-structured
Paradigm, with scalars and arrays
Nested procedure en-abyme
Subroutines that would give way
To UNIX and C++
Perfection and objectivity
No shadow or aftertaste
To linger dis-satisfied
On the organ of communication
But having stuffed my ears with cotton candy
I could not hear their dread-filled siren song
And undeterred proceeded to wrangle
With my two main beastly lingual
Human interface systems forever
At odds with each other
Insulting their respective
Shortcomings and flaws
Forever accused by Others of faltering
Accents uncommon lexical
Choices, each utterance
Redlined and submitted to Inquisition
No disquisition ever harmonious
Never to be She of the Golden Tongue
So pardon me if I now sit
drowning my rathers
At The afflicted Souls Cafè
Seeking solace in the absinthe
Of the permanently misplaced
Lost Never to Be Found.
Pina Piccolo, 01/12 /2023 under the influence of Novocaine