PARADISE LOST

Or, a Column in the Style of Poetry of Centuries Late and of Poets Unsung to Expound and Equivocate Upon a Topic of the Utmost Importance and Immediacy to the Community at Large, that being a Reflection on the Coming of Spring and Its Dire Consequences

Finally, Spring Break has come, Spring Break has gone, with April showers upon us and May flowers soon to follow, with the expected chance of late afternoon thunderstorms in June and July. Soon, it seems, it will all be over. Soon we will be freed from its dreadful grip upon our souls; its grimy wastes will clutter the byways of our lives no more; its dreary colors will cloud our eyes no longer. Soon, it seems, winter will be gone — no more sand on the sidewalk, no more rubbish heaps masquerading as ice mounds. Finally, the floor of my suite will not resemble the arena of a monster car show after the grand finale has gone slightly awry, causing several unsightly blemishes and inconvenient explosions.1

True, we may be in for more spring snows, and all will be transported back to December and to the pleasant winter wonderland that pervades when everything is nice, pretty, white and free of the decomposing hulks of melting snowmen. True, we may be headed for a cold so profound that Yale for the first time in almost 30 years has a snow day.2

But soon, says my Texas heart, my Sunbelt temperance, soon the sun will shine in New Haven once more.

And yet, this thought, in which only a month ago I rejoiced to indulge, now troubles me deeply. Indeed, I feel that the very seasons now plot against me; the climate conspires to do me in, to rob me of that in which I have found so much unexpected pleasure. No, I’m not speaking of the joy of pelting your friends in the face, just as they step out of Mory’s, dressed in their finest. I’m thinking about the gaping loss that our community is soon to suffer.

For with the foresight due my high and mighty poetic person, it seems to me that the doom of our winter’s whimsy fast flies toward us; it seems to me that the fun which once marked our days with daring is soon to disappear, dissolve, die. For what joy will we lose, what bliss shall from our breast be beaten, what everlasting happiness shall fall and sink from our minds and souls when the sun rises and, like a great perversion of Holy Mikro’s Wave, maker of all things quick and tasty and joyous to the soul’s own sense, dost melt away those frozen lakes, those oceans of omnipresent play, those seas of smiling revelry? What fun can a poor humble chap, such as I, seek when the puddles of ice that now cover our campus dear are gone?

Indeed, no greater joy did I find throughout all winter hence than that which I discovered on the surface of these icescapes. Upon them did I venture, testing strength of them and me, delighting in the sound of cracking when I the victor proved, cavorting in the sound which comes from spawning with so mere a step a myriad of cracks, testaments to my weighty presence. What greater joy is there in winter’s cold clamping paw than stepping off the path straight and narrow and oh-so-sandied — fie upon the sand — and sliding halfway ‘cross the courtyard looking up at the stars from the supreme and ultimate vantage of one’s own posterior? Who thought to tell me of such fame, of such folly, of such fun? No one.

And so I do tell you and hope these lines, fancified for your enjoyment, will inform your sentiment next time across the icy campus you do go a-walking. Next time you trip at the crack in the sidewalk, balk at the sand in your shoes, take a step on the wild side and find yourself all a-slip. No greater joy is there either to fly ‘cross campus quick as puck ‘cross ice or to leave everlasting mark and hear the voice of the very ground give great, cracking thanks for your simple step upon it.

I would but ask you this one small favor: say a word in memory of our brother ponds, soon dear-departed to be but long so near to my heart and sole. Farewell, sweet friends, who so beneficently gave themselves to me as some small thing that might make me laugh or at the very least might give me great excuse to make towards DUH with injuries and fractures and there to make a quick and long refuge from midwinter’s midterm malice.

1 Fear not my friends; the normal state of my room, to which I desire to return, is far better than this disastrous travesty and yet it resembles this self-same floor of that coliseum of modern machine mastication. Indeed, all the cars destined to be crushed, dismembered, and in pain would then neatly assemble in rows before a ramp of awesome majesty. But in the midst of this tranquility: a monster truck with wheels the size of boulders, suspended in mid-air or perhaps hung from the ceiling — and supporting thereon an array of refreshments unequaled in their divers delectability by the mind or might of mortal men. And in the center of this spread, resting atop the massive roll bar of the awesome auto, a TV whose size, scope, and dimensions surpass the moon itself. That is to say, the normal state of my room — normal here being used in the very unusual sense of “clean” — is nothing more than a fantasy built on an illusion, multiplied by myth and magic and supported by a vast array of syntactical synergy and gelatinous grammar. In other words, it is a fiction that I tell my parents in order to delude them into thinking their money well-spent by demonstrating my hygiene and my colloquial collection of large words, knowledge of which their tuition has bought me.

2 But then again it is also true, as I have so recently learned, that a six-legged crocodile must have persimmon and periwinkle polka dots. This fact is the abiding humor of all logicians, who I am convinced secretly delight in coming up with proof for their own insanity or at least ways of alleviating that condition’s more deleterious effects.

Kevin B. Alexander is deeply, passionately and verbosely committed to the study of the universe and the whimsicality found therein as well as to the spontaneous creation of very long, archaic sentences and to the pseudo-poeticisms that such an endeavor requires.