Reaching for Odessa - Part VI
Catullus Becalmed

A Work in Progress
73

You must love words how they sound what they say

How they make life meaningful everyday

How relationships start when words entangle

Enclose two people in an unseen bangle

That loops from eye to mind and mind to eye

Biochemistry making one laugh or cry

Words can do whatever words say cannot be done

Digitized their meaning becomes an impression

Meaning maybe more or less what was meant when said

Interpreted by algorithms that when all done

Ascribe a weight to words before compression

Fed to streaming feeds that are widely read

As all Rome knows words get away with murder

Nobody believes the truth anymore

A design of despots or just how it is?

Democracy dismantled girder by girder

Caesar reinterpreting all rules of law 

No Cato to stand between us and the abyss

Words cannot express as the saying goes         

How incomprehensible collective fear is

Caesar’s ambition is endless his ego’s exploding

He’s continually testing what damage he’ll do

Will there be someone he’ll say “Et tu” to?

Will words in the Bill of Rights still be adhered to?

Dick Russell © Richard M Russell

                         2025