Gesamtkunstwerk

since i've had no life lately, here's a poem to keep u entertained. found it last night in a notepad file buried in the craploads of... crap, in my laptop. "hangman" - as befitting the spirit of earth hour this week.

Hangman, by Maurice Ogden

1
Into our town the Hangman came
Smelling of gold and blood and flame
And he paced our bricks with a diffident air
And built his frame on the courthouse square.

The scaffold stood by the courthouse side,
Only as wide as the door was wide;
A frame as tall, or little more,
Than the capping sill of the courthouse door.

And we wondered, whenever we had the time,
Who the criminal, what the crime,
The Hangman judged with the yellow twist
Of knotted hemp in his busy fist.

And innocent though we were, with dread
We passed those eyes of buckshot lead;
Till one cried: "Hangman, who is he
For whom you raise the gallows-tree?"

Then a twinkle grew in the buckshot eye,
And he gave us a riddle instead of reply:
"He who serves me best," said he,
"Shall earn the rope of the gallows-tree."

And he stepped down, and laid his hand
On a man who came from another land,
And we breathed again, for another's grief
At the Hangman's hand was our relief;

And the gallows-frame on the courthouse lawn
By tomorrow's sun would be struck and gone.
So we gave him way, and no one spoke,
Out of respect for his Hangman's cloak.

2
The next day's sun looked mildly down
On roof and street in our quiet town,
And stark and black in the morning air,
The gallows-tree on the courthouse square.

And the Hangman stood at his usual stand
With the yellow hemp in his busy hand;
With his buckshot eye and his jaw like a pike
And his air so knowing and businesslike.

And we cried: "Hangman, have you not done
Yesterday with the alien one?"
Then we fell silent, and stood amazed;
"Oh, not for him was the gallows raised..."

He laughed a laugh as he looked at us:
"...Did you think I'd gone to all this fuss
To hang one man? That's a thing I do
To stretch the rope when the rope is new."

Then one cried "Murderer!" One cried "Shame!"
And into our midst the Hangman came
To that man's place. "Do you hold," said he,
"With him that was meat for the gallows-tree?"

And he laid his hand on that one's arm,
And we shrank back in quick alarm,
And we gave him way, and no one spoke,
Out of fear of his Hangman's cloak.

That night we saw with dread surprise
The Hangman's scaffold had grown in size:
Fed by the blood beneath the chute
The gallows-tree had taken root;

Now as wide, or a little more,
Than the steps that led to the courthouse door,
And tall as the writing, or nearly as tall,
Halfway up on the courthouse wall.

3
The third he took, we had all heard tell,
Was a usurer and infidel;
And "What," said the Hangman, "have you to do
With the gallows-bound, and he a Jew?"

And we cried out, "Is this one he
Who has served you well and faithfully?"
The Hangman smiled: "It's a clever scheme
To try the strength of the gallows-beam."

The fourth man's dark, accusing song
Had scratched our comfort hard and long;
And "What concern," he gave us back,
"Have you for the doomed -- the doomed and Black?"

The fifth. The sixth. And we cried again,
"Hangman, Hangman, is this the man?"
"It's a trick," he said, "that we hangmen know
For easing the trap when the trap springs slow."

And so we ceased, and asked no more,
As the Hangman tallied his bloody score;
And sun by sun, and night by night,
The gallows grew to monstrous height.

The wings of the scaffold opened wide
Till they covered the square from side to side;
And the monster cross-beam, looking down,
Cast its shadow across the town.

4
Then through the town the Hangman came
And called in the empty streets my name --
And I looked at the gallows soaring tall
And thought, "There is no one left at all

For hanging, and so he calls to me
To help pull down the gallows-tree."
And I went out with right good hope
To the Hangman's tree and the Hangman's rope.

He smiled at me as I came down
To the courthouse square through the silent town,
And supple and stretched in his busy hand
Was the yellow twist of the hempen strand.

And he whistled his tune as he tried the trap,
And it sprang down with a ready snap;
And then with a smile of awful command
He laid his hand upon my hand.

"You tricked me, Hangman!" I shouted then,
"That your scaffold was built for other men...
And I no henchman of yours," I cried,
"You lied to me, Hangman, foully lied!"

Then a twinkle grew in the buckshot eye:
"Lied to you? Tricked you?" he said. "Not I.
For I answered straight and I told you true:
The scaffold was raised for none but you.

For who has served me more faithfully
Than you with your coward's hope?" said he,
"And where are the others that might have stood
Side by your side in the common good?"

"Dead," I whispered, and amiably
"Murdered," the Hangman corrected me:
"First the alien, then the Jew...
I did no more than you let me do."

Beneath the beam that blocked the sky
None stood so alone as I;
And the Hangman strapped me, and no voice there
Cried "Stay!" for me in the empty square.

twice daily, i walk to the water dispenser at the other corner of the floor to fill up. i've never liked bending from the waist, so i'm usually on one knee when refilling. for some reason the dispenser is cramped inconveniently close to a discussion table. no one's ever thought of moving it even slightly, wonder why.

now this corner is the junction of a floor-to-ceiling window and the outer wall of ds's room (gm's office). this wall has a funky alternating pillar/glass design, with the glass sections being mostly frosted, punctuated with clear horizontal bars. and sometime last week, i noticed something in this peculiar setup.

it was midnight as i placed my tumbler under the nozzle and depressed the tap. with nothing to watch outside, i examined the wall instead. and kneeling in that narrow gap between dispenser and table, i found myself in a sneaky vantage point. the water gurgled into my bottle, as my gaze wandered through a clear bar of glass, into ds's office, out the open door, under a desk, and settled on... a colleague's legs. the legs shook leisurely, the owner's face perfectly obscured by the doorway.

it's lucky wh's not a girl.

i'm not a seasoned marathoner, so it took over 4 days to finish drawn together. a cartoon reality show - what a premise! a nice setup that ran itself aground too soon. becoz really, elimination can't be applied when the show is built upon the antics of the full motley cast. which then strips it down to simply: 8 distinct genre characters in 1 screen. still WOW.

i.e. nicely done are: musical princess clara, who summons woodland pets by song, to be butchered for lunch. arcade swordsman xandir, who is manipulated with a special combo cheat. flash webtoon spanky, who pixelates when he kena virus. japanese midget monster lingling, who speaks via engrish subtitles and whose mating dance is a fireball battle. yet... they could've been so much more.

e.g. what i mean is: spanky - could be downloaded/linked/embedded, made viral, loading bars, buffering digits, "install flash player to continue", being dragged around by an arbitrary cursor, etc. xandir - could level up, pick up potions, items, upgrade weapons and armour, do boss stages, have signature sfx, continue?-10-9-8-insert-coins, etc. toot - b&w and obsolete, she could be a makeover star (isn't this a reality tv theme?), appear in colour for once, with more 1920's speech, old-fart references...

speaking of references, there are simply too many for me, pop culture noob that i am. it'd be way funnier if i knew more tv lore. what this really means, is that the show is a fiesta of shallow parody. imagine! hanna-barbera, disney, dc, atari, nickelodeon, trading cards... are each rich in its own culture. that's the word. more than a clash of genre, it's a clash of culture - that is never fully realized. instead, it's a torrential onslaught of gay/fat/christian/racist/abuse jokes. it's crass and disturbing just for its own sake. it could've been so much more.

and yet. it's still mindlessly fucking funny. watch!!!

the finale wraps with some semblance of a framing device: an acoustic version of "la-la-la-la-labia", that debuted in s1e02. very nice. as nice as a song called "la-la-la-la-labia" gets. another nice song is the vincent-van-gogh sapfest called "i wanted u to know". the vincent-van-gogh lyrics are damn wtf out of place but hey. sample below...