23 June 2004. Another new rough draft of a mathemaku today--although it may be a final draft, too, who knows. I seem to know less and less what I'm doing, the more of these I make. This one was inspired--curses, I can't remembered what it was, and it struck only three or four hours ago. Some chance remark having to do with playing cards. I was thinking about what I could post here that wouldn't be much work. I've started work on preparing my book on the Shakespeare authorship controversy for printing, and want to concentrate on that until it's done, so the quicker I could get my blog entry out of the way, the better. I figured I'd go out to Paint Shop again, and throw something together, without worrying what it was about or how good it was. It was at that point that something happened to remind me how potent playing cards are as symbols. They've always been an important part of my life, too--although I'm no gambler or bridge fanatic or anything like that. Just someone who's played card games since he was very small, and loves the way they look, and finds their symbolic weight impressive. What can't they mean? The result

The poem as a whole is pretty sensationalistic. What continues to fascinate me about these things is how long I fiddle with them, trying to get them right, even though I have almost no conscious idea what I'm doing. Even to me they seem thrown together, yet I take great pains to position everything just where I feel they ought to be, rework the colors, enlarge or reduce parts, smooth or unsmooth. . . .