all the trinkets of the day
Is it weird to be an old man?
A few years ago, it would have been—
but now I no longer mind soggy pasta,
and I stay home so I don’t have to worry
about the ‘meant to be’ and simply smile
when I hear ‘Serait-ce possible alors?’.
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I hate people
walking abreast across the pavement
so that they could yap
as if they were taking part
in Sympósion.
Saying that, I feel somewhat embarrassed—
not so much at the sentiment,
but at the excessive solemnity
of the expression.
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If I were to run away, would it be Paris,
the Boulevard du Montparnasse perhaps?
But why not Trifouillis-les-Oies—
or why France in the first place?
Soho or Greenwich Village would suit me better, after all,
even if I never wake up to an indie rock song,
like protagonists in rom-coms, and think that a French film
opening with a typewriter cannot be bad
when played sul tasto to find out if a score
is the music.
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While learning the full Windsor
and solitude, I wondered why
life couldn’t simply arrive
pre-lived—so that I could skip
straight to the end,
circumventing the daily exercise
in genre attribution, like me—
fastidious, yet incomplete.
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Rice flour, potato starch, maize flour,
tapioca starch, gram flour, arrowroot powder,
calcium phosphates, sodium carbonates, xanthan gum,
ground black pepper, eggs, and water—
all that to make a piece of flatbread for my breakfast,
which is as revealing as Boîte ouverte
de Piero Manzoni.
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If I were born with a sixth sense—
not some paranormal hogwash,
but something like a magnetic sense
or the ability to perceive polarisation—
my world would likely be richer,
though the very thought of it makes me feel
like a physicist specialising in photology
yet not knowing what red is,
having been born blind.
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Would you rather be caught
with a copy of The Human Condition
in a Hollywood Wives dust jacket
or the other way around—
assuming it makes a difference at all,
since either way it proves you have met
a literacy attainment target?
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Sometimes I question the old bloke in the mirror,
‘For how long do you plan to remain a mere victim
of adolescence?’ but he never responds,
so I’d like to ask my readers—all three of them,
but one is biased (myself), another stays silent
(an American poet with a good education),
and the last has been retrained into a daft office drone
(are the shareholders happy now, Mr Amodei?).
In the end, it all boils down to nothing much—
a sentiment, perhaps.
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I have seen Adam and Eve in a book
depository—he was a keeper; she, a dust jacket
fitter, who once learnt
at a lovers’ lane that, whether it’s fellatio
or a blowjob, it is supposed to be time well spent,
until they give you the look and then you know—
after all those years you are merely acquainted—
you and that shadow of yours.
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