A man’s whole life in a single stanza—what would that be? An arbitrary anecdote with a half-baked punchline over a pint of lager that dared to turn into a good work of fiction in the attic of a morgue? Perhaps. But this would imply that it is possible continue reading
Month: Nov 2022
If only Kiton and Brioni made straitjackets
Scribblers sometimes mistake ink for blood, or maybe the other way around. When it happens, shattered glass slashes through pages that, all of a sudden, lack subtle onomatopoeias, even though they were never short of promising continue reading
By the way
We are going to die. Yes, and we will die in a well-covered silence that changes nothing—see visitors’ beds, which count the strenuous hours of uneventful sleep with the precision of borrowed time—a performance reluctantly paid in advance continue reading
Paradise lost
Sometimes I think back to my adolescence, with its hopeless battle with acne and hectic masturbation schedule on a creaky couch beneath a shoddy replica of the Black Madonna of Czestochowa I was supposed to pray to every night continue reading
The grey sheep
I’m not sure what is expected of me, or I don’t remember—assuming someone told me that once, when I was looking for something tangible, even just a bruised apple—although it hardly matters, or so they say, as long as I follow the flock. But maybe that’s all it really is: knowing the decorum continue reading
A substitute
I envy you, my boy, with your damn good name, a noble one, still oblivious to the bitter taste of the lecherous garden’s fruit, where the precious moments behind the curtains provided a temporary substitute for innocence by stealing continue reading
A perfection of my own
In a way, I gave up on my chances. For a time, life was about perfection, which was tantamount to the good of the great Athenian. And even if not, there’s always been a perfect body, perfect job, perfect family, with a wife continue reading
An unintentionally blank page
Immersed in the words of emphatic announcers, with each new cleft sentence less inclined to elicit that wicked “who are you?,” did you stop asking questions because everything became complicated, or did everything become complicated continue reading
Earworms
What should you do if you get strong chords stuck in your head and can’t get them out? Or perhaps they are words, repeated over and over, like an unscheduled interlocution with yesteryear’s obsessions, except that there is only inexpressible dread on your part. continue reading
On All Saints’ Day
Sitting in the armchair by the window, I looked at the fallen leaves soaked in the rain, beaten by the heels of passers-by rushing into the unknown as far as the dust they are made of, continue reading
hidden pilcrow 