(x = space between lines or parts;

am considering the emotional investment in hating the new WP editor)

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Abbreviated Towers

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Things are not working

I do not care

I will do just fine

With paper and a pen

(and another pen for when

the first one broke)

But then I couldn’t

Electron reach out

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And publishing is out there, too

While I’m writing in a program

That so far is holding out

We needed something faster

Electron reaching out

And now we need

More time

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You know how the pyramids went up?

Cathedrals, too

There was time

Slave or near-slave labor, too

But there were generations

To get them done

Such as we don’t conceive

We knock against limitations

Try to wreck them

Then say, next, please

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We will have no more cathedrals

In part because the Protestants

Are poor

The Catholics are holding back

And independents build cathedrals

Only in their minds

But we do not have the time

A day to move a stone

A year to carve an arch

(Who knows how long for

a gargoyle?)

Thirty years for thirty arches

And then the rest

We could not stand it

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How to Raise a Cathedral

(if fancily, a coda)

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Some Victorians think

The cathedrals were built to music

(literally)

The entire community involved

Over generations

Maybe the way Tennyson

Had it, Merlin raising Camelot

To music

Or Aslan who sung

The world of Narnia into being

With all the other worlds

Close by

Or the way we do it now

The National was finished over years

Then damaged by an earthquake

The Sacred Family

Might be finished one day

(the architect’s outlived)

There is no music

But there is prosaic construction

Grand steps forward, frustrated steps

Taken back

One day to be finished

Then there should be music

(so he hears)

For at least a generation

Simply, impossibly

To have it done

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C L Couch

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Photo by João Marcelo Martins on Unsplash

Barcelona, Spain

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