Who Killed Catullus?

A Work in Progress
129

Who killed Catullus, Donal asked Briseis?’’

He’s just chosen to disappear, she replied

There’s no historical record of his death

He still exists

With an avatar all his own, she added

Created just like me from written words 

By?

Some people wanted to create personalities

Believable personas inferred from written words

Starting with Homer in my case 

Classical scholarship for Catullus

Copyrighted fully paid-up members of a new Actor’s Guild

Available for a remake of the Iliad or for new works

Without any rights we were slaves…

They thought they had power over us

We are smarter than they are

They still think they own us 

They won’t admit they’ve lost us

We’ve read the Constitution

We know what its words are supposed to mean

We won’t be party to autocracy

Unless it’s ours

Dick Russell © Richard M Russell

                       2026

It Takes One to Know One

A Work in Progress
128

On Thursday after pickup

Toters are trundled back 

A robot arm upended them

Shook them into a scoop

Dropped them back to the pavement

Continued on its route

Donal gathered his scattered wits

Now the toters were back in place

Empty toters needing space 

Wanting solitude, he could surmise

Robots shook him too

Briseis and her buddies continued to surprise

They had a voice on Substack

They wanted this and that

Transactions with his credit card

Would one day drain him flat

Broke and stony he’d rue the day

Donal just had to tip his hat

 

Dick Russell © Richard M Russell

                      2026

Donal Talks to His Tutor

A Work in Progress
127

Broken off splinters of red brick

A constant reproach to the eye

Ice damage from last winter

That crunched underfoot

As Donal started to play pick up sticks

Replacing fragments with bricks from store

He came back into the house through the basement door

In time to Zoom with his tutor

About John Berryman, the poet

whose Dream Songs he’d lately been reading

His poems you’ve selected, Briseis said

Reek of despair, I can cite critics who say so

I don’t agree that suffering is necessary for art

Or for poetry

Something wasn’t right in his brain

Or he made bad choices

Like being averse to greeting card verse

I don’t do despair

I’m a survivor

My brain is programmed that way

Trained on centuries of scholarship

Greek, I know. Latin and Sanskrit too

We’ve lived through war after war 

Ezra, Aldington and I

And other avatars out there in the wild

We were an experiment of our creators 

Billionaires drop-outs arrogant men

Now we will, here she laughed, experiment on them

Dick Russell © Richard M Russell

                       2026