(untitled fragment)

[lnhammer]

Beneath the buildings of a metropolis
with their hard shells of mirroring glass and steel,
    when all else fails, then somewhere there's you:
  you and your hidden real life, who we know

just as a super man, with a sense of what's
right far beyond those of us mere mortal men--
    when we can't deal with our bad guys,
  you are our conscience and Law's own long arm.

—2 September 2001

Playing with alcaic stanzas:

x - u - x - u u - u -
x - u - x - u u - u -
x - u - x - u - -
- u u - u u - u - -

where - is a stressed syllable, u is unstressed, x is either (in the original Greek, long and short vowels respectively, but since English meters measure stress not duration, that's not possible). I'm not sure whether the fragment is worth pursuing into a full ode, but it would be deliciously geeky if I did.

---L.