Mr Honk suddenly felt the urge to write a letter,
only to end up writing a whole four and freezing
after that affectionate salutation when he realised
he had no addressee.
In his juvenile days he’d most likely write to Santa,
but now a bottle message seemed the only option,
though he was out of Diamant Bleu, and there was
the matter of pollution.
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As life’s main ingredient,
truism hardly belongs to the compartment
labelled ‘imponderabilia’, yet that is precisely
where Mr Honk tends to place it,
but that’s hardly anything out of the ordinary
when one considers his other eccentricities,
as when, for instance, he reaches the place
that was the sole reason for reading a book
only to pause, much like the faithful
who linger in the vestibule
to read the parish announcements
and then dip their fingertips
in the holy water in the aspersorium
to make the sign of the cross
before joining a coryphée in the matronaeum.
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Mr Honk always wondered what was expected of him.
Something, for sure; otherwise, what would be the point?
Especially since, despite his name, he was a rather quiet fella,
without much of an ambition of his own or a seminal act
of cowardice—nothing beyond low tea with the provost
Barbariccia or collecting the whole Everyman’s Library
and actually reading it, and all because of a hunch
that there may be maybe in the sure.
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… when playing mornings, how easy it is
to confuse a tuning fork with a piano
or Die Zwitscher-Maschine drawing silence.
Mr Honk’s hand hesitated for a moment
as he put a period after the closing sentence
of the belated valedictory obituary
clacked out on one of the inherited typewriters—
he couldn’t shake the feeling that he was
a ninny with impostor syndrome,
like his maisonette that had everything
but the essential furniture.
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While preparing for The Waste Land, Mr Honk observed
the future custodians sailing their four wheels in a downpour
and wondered if the previous inhabitant of his study
also echoed Dryden’s grumbling about the wanton boys
with their ‘I’ll tell yer wot ‘e is, I’ll tell yer strite’—
a façon de parler that’s enthralling to the point it hurts.
But as an incorporeal entity—with his abandoned language
of an estranged homeland—who was he to complain?
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An inherited maisonette with a desk
and a somewhat belittled yet elaborate vocabulary
set the stage for Mr Honk to start a new life.
He never met that distant relative,
whose title turned out to be a misreading
of the initials of his first and middle names,
from the time when he refused to use capital letters—
but Mr Honk learnt that only from the headstone:
Meroz R. Nothing, né niczy.
No wonder Mr Nothing had never cried
out for an act of sincerity
and grief.
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With a nameplate on his door
and a stanza in his wallet,
Mr Honk stumbled upon
the first smidgeon of perpetuity,
but as a newborn he looked back
at the five decades of his life
with a hint of reservation—
fate might have spared him
the habitual thumb-munching
but not the descriptive grammar:
You ain’t lived nothing yet!
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Part hermit, part monk, Mr Honk—
courtesy of Mr Wallace—
wondered at what subordinate clause
his sentence would abruptly end,
even if he was not quite sure
whether he was writing a field report
or an epigraph.
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Mr Honk has been born out of necessity,
as no one knew how to pronounce his real name
or if he even had one; after all, he often struck people
as a rather peculiar figure—an elderly bairn
who always wanted to write long and amicable letters
but didn’t foresee that he would become the sole addressee.
But he came to terms with that just as he did with the fact
that some books were taking him longer, though he never knew
if it was the extent, the typeface and kerning,
or simply the purport.
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