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Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!

Taste: an oaky Cabernet
Sight: a wine's legs
Sound: cries of pain; yowling; "a sparrow"
Smell: balsamic reduction; a moldy foot; musky damp carpet - a warm, inside apartment hallway
Touch: gently held in a leaf and hand; cold, wet paws
Extra: tiramisu means pick me up; to molder, moldering;
"No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream."
— Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House
"Ozymandias," Percy Bysshe Shelley (1818)
I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shatter'd visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamp'd on these lifeless things,
The hand that mock'd them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains: round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
Grateful for: embracing change

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