Boredom in limbo

    Stranded in limbo, clinging to some bits of metatext, surrounded only by the Jamaicans and their poles and little drums, Arthur moaned "There's even less background now, and I don't care, I never had a character anyway — I am just me, both of us." "Da!" agreed the comrades, who kept together better than the popes. "Dada." "That's the problem," — Hannibal looked resigned, "I was supposed to be 'back at base'. It was always too late for you guys, anyway. And where am I?" Earwicker beamed up from the subtext. "The origin is always a trace," he said.

    "What about Mama?" contributed Theodora, who was now bald and wearing dungarees. "It's all very well you avant garde people, who all happen to be men even when you are common nouns, continually abolishing the space-time continuum and/or trying to get on with the action. But I am almost as bored as the romance."

    In somewhere soon did H.C.E.
    Another stereotype decree
    Where Alf and Hannibal began
    To acknowledge that a "real man"
    Cannot hyperventilate without a physical existence subject to the usual problematics of time and space.