Sometimes I feel like Mr. Linea, always surprised
by the abrupt end of the line and yet chasing birds
away from the twittering machine mercilessly
hanging in my bedroom full of silhouettes.
And while each fight may seem a bit superficial,
all the previous ones were won with relative ease.
In fact, all I had to do was check every morning
if I still knew how to breathe in and out, casually
count the heartbeats left until the last one,
and indulge in a few other guilty pleasures.
The heaviest book I own
is ‘The Norton Anthology of English Literature,’
a whole nine—well, almost—pounds of great texts,
starting with ‘Cædmon’s Hymn.’
With all my love for books, I never imagined
that these two volumes would work so well
as dumbbells.
My name means ‘gift of Yahweh,’ which is ironic
considering I don’t believe in deities,
and even more so since I was the sole reason
for my parents’ marriage in the first place,
and it wasn’t a happy one. If I were to guess,
they probably had no idea. But come to think of it,
even if I had a name as solid as Peter,
I would still have to get used to being alone
and learn to live with the pain
gradually spreading throughout my arm.
And while I never liked it, it seems having a name
chosen on a whim wasn’t the worst thing after all.
Between window shopping and visiting the ice cream parlour,
I went to an art gallery with my nieces today,
and while walking around, a thought occurred to me: what if art
is not what hangs on the walls, but what hides
the signs of boredom that anoint the faces of those viewing it?
If only I could believe in a sentence that begins with ‘I’ and ‘myself,’
one that soothes the gripping drama of coffee beans in a howling grinder,
one that covers the silence with ‘One too many mornings’ on the turntable,
one that sums up a man’s life without conveying persuasive language,
one that perhaps this once I myself would dare to resist falling for,
except the forbidden never asks for forgiveness, and that’s the sentence.
How far have we come from the caves
of Altamira, Lascaux, and Chauvet-Pont-d’Arc
to the pit on Mare Tranquillitatis—or how little?
In a way, it’s ironic that we plan to live in a cave
again, although the moon is no laughing matter,
since we like to think we’ve grown over the millennia,
even if in the end it’s just demographics.
Time measured by worn shirt collars and holes in socks,
or by glyphs drawn haphazardly by seagulls on windows
to be washed away by rain eventually, or by the varying
intensity and amplitude of pain in an arm—is it truly all
but nothing? After all, if I learned anything over time,
it was to appreciate a piece of home-made flatbread
with Moroccan-style hummus and black or green olives,
spiced with Sir Roger’s complaints about nightingales
and strumpets at Spring Garden.
Love is not a word—it’s an acronym,
but you will never learn what it stands for
until one day a man in a horsehair wig asks you
for its cash equivalent transfer value, or CETV,
and a few other lovely abbreviations.
I used to say that I’m never bored
because I share my time with a very interesting person
—myself. But lately, I’ve come to the conclusion
that I’m not that interesting after all.
Could this be why I so envy the bumblebees
bouncing off the linden blossoms outside the window?
hidden pilcrow 