It takes a nonsense poet to make real sense of this mad mad world. Here's a view into the wonderful if surreal world of visionary Christian Morgenstern who seems to be well aware of blue-sky venture schemes and pulls the plug from the bathrooms of collectively-funded fictitious construction schemes, albiet ones attracting rip-offs to fund an elite in rootless ambition, exilic travel and wealth. Otherwise, also seeing, he removed himself from dangerous ones, for he left militaristic Germany for its warmongering, and died in Italy.
THE PICKET FENCE
- by Christian Morgenstern (1871-1914)
One time there was a picket fence
with space to gaze from hence to thence.
An architect who saw this sight
approached it suddenly one night,
removed the spaces from the fence,
and built of them a residence.
The picket fence stood there dumbfounded
with pickets wholly unsurrounded,
a view so loathsome and obscene,
the Senate had to intervene.
The architect, however, flew
to Afri- or Americoo.
* * *
- from the German, translation to English by Max Knight
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