This deduction is supported by the reference in the next couplet to 'half-winged flocks', for Batman and Robin are but half-men, half-birds. If Dear Bruce is Bruce Wayne, the speaker of the poem could very well be his crime-fighting partner, Robin. Does the chain become more solid if I mention that the tribe that nursed Walker back to health, the Bandar, were slaves of another tribe called the Wasaka? That Walker, like Robert Bruce and Mad Anthony Wayne, led the oppressed to throw off their oppression? A ghostly chain of associations, from Dear Bruce to Bruce Wayne to The Phantom to pirates to the gents. How is the origin-story connected to 'Memento Mori'? Through the 'pirates', who 'attack, bolting out of the loo' in the poem. His son followed in his footsteps, and his son, and so the superhero(s) gains another sobriquet 'The Ghost who Walks' for his seeming immortality. I swear to devote my life to the destruction of piracy, greed, cruelty, and injustice, in all their forms! My sons and their sons shall follow me.ДЄnd became the first Phantom. Walking on the beach one day, he found the dead body of the pirate leader and, after allowing vultures to do their work, swore an oath on the pirate's skull: was washed ashore and saved by a tribe of pygmies.

It all began when pirates boarded the ship of Christopher Walker and killed his father, the ship captain. The origin-story of The Phantom provides another link to Yeow Kai Chai's poem. I remember here the poem's reference, 44 couplets later, to 'vinyl phantoms'. Ghosts were on the ghostwriter's mind, for his suggestions for Batman's secret name were influenced by the comic book superhero, The Phantom. Is he perhaps the 'ghostwriter' that the poem mentions 16 couplets later? Memento Mori. More would slip out of Finger's fingers when the comics appeared with the byline 'Batman created by Bob Kane' and left Finger empty-handed. How funny that words can slip out of one's fingers and flip. 'I tried Adam, HancockвЂ¦ then I thought of Mad Anthony Wayne.' By colonialism, I think Bill Finger meant the opposite, anti-colonialism, as embodied by the American rebels. As for Wayne, Bill Finger wanted a name that would suggest colonialism. The name Bruce, according to Bill Finger, came from Robert Bruce, the Scottish patriot who fought the English. From being a skull, meaning becomes more fugitive, a criminal.Д«atman was invented by a guy called Bob Kane, but Bruce Wayne was christened by a collaborator with the rather wonderful name of Bill Finger. The World's Greatest Detective, who will figure out the clues and apprehend the guilty, as I will apprehend the poem's meaning. A superhero without any supernatural powers (Memento Mori). I am sitting in my home office in New York City, reading this letter-poem again, and the sun is shining with a special sweetness after the snowstorm. You are Bruce Wayne, of course! The secret identity of Batman, the masked crime-fighter of Gotham City, the Caped Crusader.

(I am only a shopkeeper, remember?) After all, if you are Bruce, you may not be thinking, on receipt of this poem, 'Who am I?' Or you may, if the letter catches you in a strange moment. I should say ' my curiosity' instead, since I should not presume to speak for everyone. 'Dear Bruce,' the poem 'Memento Mori' (from pretend I'm not here, Firstfruits Publications, 2006) begins, and so pricks our curiosity about the identity of the recipient of this letter-poem. All our life, we hold death in our heads. The skull is a symbol for death it is also a synecdoche for a dead man.

When I finally focus on the Latin words, on what they mean, I think of a human skull in a dark medieval painting now hanging in some Florentine palazzo. Sure, like all of us too, but somehow it matters that the word is a Japanese name.

I'm always reading 'memento' as 'momento' for some reason, 'remember' as a busy Spanish shopkeeper's 'a moment, please.' And 'Mori' is the name of a Japanese man, who will die, like all Japanese men. Going with the Flow: The Form of Allusion in Yeow Kai ChaiвЂ™s poem вЂњMemento MoriвЂќ QLRS - Essays : Going with the Flow: The Form of Allusion in Yeow Kai ChaiвЂ™s poem вЂњMemento MoriвЂќ | Vol.

Luscious jackson lesbian