But first, some verse on the subject…
I. Invoking a Non-Existent Muse to Inspire Us with Talent We Don’t Have While Protecting Us from Our Own Evil
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O Calliope, Muse of Commix, hail!
Daughter of Zeus and Memory,
First among your sisters nine,
Wielding divine stylus pen and tablet scroll,
There you are, fairest frequency
In our electromagnetic sky!
Hail, I cry, hail! Now
Again, let us begin, let us set sail
Imagining, in our saga-sped keel…
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Stir up a gale!
To inspirit our Ship of Fancy
With skilled maneuver of the Mind
Like a picked-up wind of Invention
That sudden starts to whip and blow
Across the parch of reckless soul and wrack of bow
Stranded and fevering abandoned upon
Sick phantom waters entombing their sunken gone
After long and deadly dead-bird fail
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That our subtle craft may carried be
Upon the frothy waves of storying seas
Rising from the deeps of horrid memories
Like giant scaly serpents of half-submerged truths
Monsters breaking surface with humped and arching spines
From the gray churning swells of willed and wicked deeds
Conjured in black sorceries of preferred evil creeds
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That we may keep singing our tale
Upon the epic surges of Time’s debris
In fallen Life’s vast and terrifying ocean
Steering between the floating dead masses
And swerving out of Leviathan’s motion
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And waters of fire, into Wisdom’s sun-ambered sky
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And that we may also be
Rocky hazards spared,
Which in the shallows lie.
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II. The Right and Just Fate of Versifying Filchers
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Funny*, how those who admit to stealing
Hasten to send all others reeling
Who’ve dared pilfer some illegitimate fruits
Of the so-called originator’s poetic pursuits
Oh, a line or two, at most, a few words, or preamble,
Like, “In the beginning is my end,” just for example,
By serving us with ceases and desists
Citing copyright breach and IP theft
That carry portentous threats of lawsuits
Made good with summonses-complaints, if we persists,
To ruin us for all our toil’s semblable
And cruelly leaving us of poesy bereft.
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*Funny, indeed, how this stanza has no place in this introductory verse, except that the “poet” who wrote it, did so, we have it on unrevealed authority, only to grind over some grievance or other appertaining to past poets far greater than he. Proving that somewhere inside the fat and turgid prose of The Illustrious H. Bloom there floated a globule of verity, repeated ad nauseum. Who himself stole the best literary theory he ever came up with from T.S. Eliot, whom he absolutely reviled (as Bugs Bunny might say, ‘Ironic, isn’t it?’), and spared no opportunity to say so. For Eliot stands at the very center of the entire Commix conundrum. He contaminates it; he’s absolutely everywhere and, recently discovering that to be the case, there’s not a thing we can do about it. Don’t ask; we know. Signed, helpfully, The Kyiv Unedited Secret Editorial Board
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III. Inter-Kowalski Correspondence (The Kowalski Letters, aka The Kowalski Collection) is Demanded of the Muse with a Lusty Enthusiasm that Stops Just Short of Threats of Unspecified Aggression
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O Muse of Correspondence Force,
Again, we shout, hail!
Give us the Kowalski Letters! Bundled neatly into sheaves!
The hard copies between them, Agatha’s, Stan’s, and Steve’s,
Sent by first-class post – the total hoard!
Hand over your faery sacks of their mail
By which we’ll now chart our narrative course
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Blast us inked pulp folded and sent
By first-class relay – the whole collection!
From Michigan, mostly whence
To Kyiv, the capital of Insane
By years of war rent
Through lots of death, and lots of pain
A war that’ll end some moment hence
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Penned, in part, by Agatha Ptak, nee Kowalski
To her nephew, Steve
Urging him, among other bothers
To welcome and accept
Her brother, Steve’s Uncle Stan
Who wants to pay a visit
That they two may talk, man to man
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Now, O Muse, must we ravel our tale
Toward the ruddy Polak, rugged and hale
In whose missives we need also dig,
By email sent, mostly to annoy his sister
An inflexible resistor of electronic means
(Nor to phone calls can Agatha be bent,
And with contempt she views the use of video screens)
Considering this non-literary technique below her
But has been broken by her kin to finally consent
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Emails – we’ve got them all! but still desire,
Just in case, the papery set entire.
No need for Eloquence, the work’s been done,
Just give us the epistolary gun
That we may shoot the letters out,
Selectively, at times abridged, or
Simply one by one…
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Filed by Sir Commix Poet, September 7, 2026