It was She, my mother, who gave me the keys to Imaginationland,
With all those fabulous art museums
She took me to, in Minneapolis—
Putting an end to my perfect playground:
How vividly I recall the eerie lighting;
The multiple levels & lack of clocks;
The videos & dioramas & unique-smelling plastic gift shop figurines
(Which we could always afford, when I wanted them badly enough);
The long Jurassic curve of the thunder lizard’s neck;
A pterodactyl swooping so low its wings tousled my snow-white locks;
A glitter-eyed saber-toothed tiger, trapped in the tar pit of its demise;
All those taxidermied stranger-than-fiction fragments of Mesozoic reality;
And how I wanted to never, ever leave.
—Tony Longshanks LeTigre +11+
We swim in oceans of information
And try not to drown
But would drowning not be preferable to beaching ourselves
Like a moribund whale?