Linux Songs Poems

In high school in Brooklyn
I was the baseball manager,
proud as I could be
I chased baseballs,
gathered thrown bats
handed out the towels                   Eventually, I bought my own
It was very important work              but it was dark blue while
for a small spastic kid,                the official ones were green
but I was a team member                 Nobody ever said anything
When the team got                       to me about my blue jacket;
their warm-up jackets                   the guys were my friends
I didn't get one                        Yet it hurt me all year
Only the regular team                   to wear that blue jacket
got these jackets, and                  among all those green ones
surely not a manager                    Even now, forty years after,
                                        I still recall that jacket
                                        and the memory goes on hurting.
                -- Bart Lanier Safford III, "An Obscured Radiance"

In Riemann, Hilbert or in Banach space
Let superscripts and subscripts go their ways.
Our asymptotes no longer out of phase,
We shall encounter, counting, face to face.
                -- Stanislaw Lem, "Cyberiad"

In the dimestores and bus stations
People talk of situations
Read books repeat quotations
Draw conclusions on the wall.
                -- Bob Dylan

In the early morning queue,
With a listing in my hand.
With a worry in my heart,       There on terminal number 9,
Waitin' here in CERAS-land.     Pascal run all set to go.
I'm a long way from sleep,      But I'm waitin' in the queue,
How I miss a good meal so.      With this code that ever grows.
In the early mornin' queue,     Now the lobby chairs are soft,
With no place to go.            But that can't make the queue move fast.
                                Hey, there it goes my friend,
                                I've moved up one at last.
                -- Ernest Adams, "Early Morning Queue", to "Early
                   Morning Rain" by G. Lightfoot

In the land of the dark the Ship of the
Sun is driven by the Grateful Dead.
                -- Egyptian Book of the Dead

In this vale
Of toil and sin
Your head grows bald
But not your chin.
                -- Burma Shave

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure dome decree:
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.
So twice five miles of fertile ground
With walls and towers were girdled round:
And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills,
Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree;
And here were forest ancient as the hills,
Enfolding sunny spots of greenery.
                -- S.T. Coleridge, "Kubla Kahn"

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan a stately pleasure dome decree
But only if the NFL to a franchise would agree.

Into love and out again,
        Thus I went and thus I go.
Spare your voice, and hold your pen:
        Well and bitterly I know
All the songs were ever sung,
        All the words were ever said;
Could it be, when I was young,
        Someone dropped me on my head?
                -- Dorothy Parker, "Theory"

It cannot be seen, cannot be felt,
Cannot be heard, cannot be smelt.
It lies behind starts and under hills,
And empty holes it fills.
It comes first and follows after,
Ends life, kills laughter.