I tried ice skating once. It ended badly—I killed a little girl,
or rather would have if I had hit her in the head with my skate
instead of the leg, which wasn’t far off, considering her height,
when I suddenly fell—all just to have a song with someone
(it didn’t work out in the end) or at least score another point
in that petty midlife skirmish of mine.
Have you ever asked yourself what would happen to a trifling quote
from the now obsolete phone book if, after years of practising being sullen
(while baking flatbread in residual heat, which is a different matter entirely),
he were accused of condescension simply because of a garrulous sentence
that he dared to ridicule? Perhaps he recalls the fourth mystic ape, the one
covering his crotch, but where’s the fun in that? Nothing beats casual trolling,
after all, in the temple of tadpole literature.
I had a stew
made with butternut squash,
sweet potatoes,
and sun-dried tomatoes
for dinner tonight—a humble result
of emptying the fridge into a pot
in the hope that the final product
would be edible—while listening to Joni
when the thought came to me
how utterly ridiculous creatures we are,
stuffing our mouths
only to excrete some hours later,
repeating it over and over again like markers
in an indefinite stretch of time between now and then,
and in the end none of us is any wiser;
everyone is just making it up as they go,
but perhaps some are better
at pretending
that they know clouds.
Between commercials and restless sleep, I worry about the closet romantic
who mocks karaoke—mediocre covers of his favourite myths—just to maintain
a cold demeanour that was supposed to shield him from getting hurt again,
because if one day he realises the cure is worse than the disease, I might lose
a convenient fallback topic that distracts from that innate indifference of mine.
Does being alive merely by habit still count as living?
I guess it all comes down to the definition of living.
Besides, even being alive is a menacing slippery slope
that can degenerate precipitously into name-calling
and ultimately a factional war of attrition and demise
of the couple you once were.
Of all the fallacies, Golden Age thinking is the one
I could least likely fall victim to, since I am a poet,
and being miserable is in a poet’s job description,
whether it involves the present, the future, or the past.
And what is this happiness everyone’s talking about
anyway, let alone how and where to actually find it?
If anything, not having been born would be the only
glimmer of happiness I can think of, but it’s too late.
I was never in a hurry to learn how to play an old man—heck, being a responsible adult
was already a challenge—because I always had plenty of time to do so, or so I thought,
until the day I woke up and realised with horror that the scarecrow was already on the horizon.
I wonder if that’s why they call it the golden birthday, except I have a sneaking suspicion
it’ll turn out to be made of pyrite.
I don’t own a telly or that defining piece of furniture
that usually occupies a prominent spot in the living room,
yet I’m indistinguishable from your average couch potato,
at least in spirit, if not in body (although the latter is slowly
catching up with that image), which makes me wonder:
Is the bookworm a social pest or just a harmless homebody?
When I was a boy, a drawing of red ants
walking along a Möbius strip caught my eye.
I thought their lives must be pretty boring
(not that mine had ever come close to even a clumsily sketched tesseract),
but I never imagined I could envy them, and yet here I was,
faced with the alternative—relentless pestering:
Get out; find someone; live a little!
Hell truly is paved with good intentions.
hidden pilcrow 