My poetry written in English
I like romcoms
with Hollywood grannies—
when they still fit into the twenties bracket—
not yet afflicted by that ordeal
of the imagination called ‘growing older’,
where there’s no gruesome impudence
but the question: How old are you?
I guess it’s easier with the discreet
Quel âge as-tu?
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Call me a heathen, but since time immemorial,
people of my ilk have always had the feeling
that we would rather hear Cage’s Four Thirty-Three at dawn
than listen to the seagullian chorales and rhetoric classes
in magpieese on the accidental agora of our windowsill.
And when I toss and turn furiously in bed at five in the morning,
I can’t help but wonder what third-rate college produced
this intelligent designer.
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My humble neighbours have recently started exercising
their vocal cords, only I’ve never ordered Wordsworth’s The Daffodils
to be recited in magpieese on my bedroom windowsill
at five in the morning.
However, it did get me thinking: what if the answer really is forty-two—
although I’m still not a cricket fan—but it was ordered by magpies, not mice,
and I’m stuck amongst shadows, alone, in this panopticon
full of sophisticated probability engines?
But why do I feel
like one ancient Greek is mocking another again?
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When the mind needs a change of scenery,
all you need is a camera obscura
and a list of rice cultivars,
or you can always expand your collection
of smooth utterances
like, ‘I recognise that nature is unforgiving,
but I would say that a butcher is a necessity,
while a zoo, a circus and a fishbowl are the harbingers
of the true cruelty’—after all, it requires impeccable table manners to swallow
your every l’esprit de l’escalier
without choking.
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Have you ever seen an elephant
swimming in the ocean, and to Beethoven at that?
Beautiful, isn’t it? Perhaps,
but before you ceremoniously place that coup de foudre
in your Altoids tin, next to all the treasures
you’ve been collecting forever, think
about whether you really saw Rajan smiling
or if it was just the telly acting as a mirror.
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A dumbbell in my ribcage, like a dead weight
on a chopping board, pulverised—
a change of air might do it good—
and yet still carrying on
with its tedious staccato,
as if nothing ever happened.
Would it shock the ladies?
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There is nothing like father-son bonding
over car washing on Saturday afternoon—
even if rendered futile by the torrential rain—
on the long list of childhood gaieties we’ll try
to forget for the rest of our lives.
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There’s nothing like a rainy morning,
after long days of sunshine,
to convince you that there’s a carrying power
somewhere out there that keeps the balance
until it pours to the point of flooding,
making you realise that it’s all just a numbers racket.
That’s where you are truly wrong,
because even a wicked scheme assumes a will
where there is none—but you won’t hear that
from a bookie.
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With every line a liability—
and Ea von Allesch out of reach—
I can’t leave my expectations
at the mercy of the em dash.
And while I can always hang a thousand words
celebrating the forlornly sought-after mortality
of Death itself
on the wall,
there’s no need to be overly dramatic—
everyone deserves a postmortem, after all,
even the slightly hysterical.
Isn’t that what a pied-à-terre is for?
Perhaps.
Unless you make it your living
room.
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hidden pilcrow 