Big Boy thinks he's in control.  But then he falls.  And all of a sudden everything stops. 

It could have been worse. My glasses broke, but not my bones. And I had the good sense to collapse at the entrance to a hospital.

That was about a week ago. And I'm still in pain. The medicine helps, but it makes me depressed and cranky as hell. 

In this issue of Verse-Virtual you will find a wide variety of poems: 

• an Abyssinian love song, 
  
• a tribute to an unrecognized Olympic hero, 
  
• a look back at Lot's wife, 
  
• a poignant blessing of a bathroom — and
• you'll go on a museum tour in search of mankind's prehistoric roots, 
  
• you'll revisit Hansel and Gretel, 
  
• you'll behold Cezanne's beloved Sainte-Victoire, and
  
• you'll listen to poetry with Chaucer... and more... B U T--

D I G   T H I S : 

There is one poet in our V-V community who is a  R O C K - C L I M B E R.

• And you will sit with him, after a climb, as he plunges his burning toes into freezing water.
  

And when you scroll down to the bottom of this page, you will see him somehow managing to hold onto the sheer face of a stone cliff even as he drills a hole for a bolt... and yes, gasping is permitted...

Now — me — I also know something about stone — or at least asphalt.  I fell face-first on some of it last week.  (Maybe I wasn't wearing the right shoes.) 

But I won't tell any of that to Robert Walton.