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the Maiden feareth capture/and felt a crawling dread/”we’re heading for a trap, sure–

it’s after nine!” she said.

the Ogre in his prison/flexed arms and stamped and howled/and shouted oaths unchristian–

“it’s almost ten!” he growled.

at ten the grate slid sideways/the Ogre leapeth free/and boundeth in the night haze–

“she’s MINE by one!” saith he.

the Maiden hears his roaring/and checks her rearview mirror/denied the pedal-flooring–

“Gadzooks! He getteth nearer!!”

The Ogre weaves through traffic/near-gridlock’d with horns blaring/and screams with curses graphic–

FINALLY, she is at and through the scene of the accident, and soon is no longer surrounded by morbid rubberneckers. She gently presses the accelerator, kissing her imaginary Ogre, who again has helped her through a tedious gridlock episode, as he fades.

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Above is a playful riff-o-rama on the Probabilistic Quantum Multiverse, wherein for every way things CAN happen, they DO, and each possibility gets its own private universe. There is no one acrostic poem above, but here is one variation:

Grant this logorithmic soul
Righteous lack of wrongish troll. O
Isthmus straitens bric-a-brac
Deviathan devoids the rack.

I thought I’d coined a new word with Deviathan (quickdef: Deviant Leviathan), but I find to my dismay there are over 13,000 search results. [sad face]

Though this is playful, it is also a try at Art with a capital A. The illustration is a visual pun for Gridlock. It is a forbidding, Cartesian-coordinated box, and visual pun #2 is that all my subversive/versive thinking is done outside the box. Plus, the bottom row of boxes is a wordless, step-by-step lesson in how to draw a 15 by 15 grid freehand with nothing but paper and pencil. This is handy for crossword puzzle constructors who want to go Commando.

How? Why? Let me close both wordlessly and wordfully with this work in progress:

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