My poetry written in English
Thank you, Father, for the acoustics lessons
after midnight, when drunken screams carry best,
and for introducing me to the arcana of ballistics
using living room chairs as convenient projectiles,
and for the blunt realisation that a bare fist
could easily punch through a bathroom door,
and for all the belt-enforced ethics classes
correcting my adolescent lapses of judgement.
Only after all that, you never told me
why you brought me here.
I brought home a used copy of T.S. Eliot’s collected works and cried
like Peter Kien on his wedding night—there was something tragic
about the torn and stained dust jacket and the dirty edges, as if Faber
and Faber had printed a hewer’s handbook—only to catch a glimpse
of a snob in the mirror.
They say that people won’t know how you feel
unless you tell them, yet it’s difficult to expect understanding
from those who dream of immortality—
where opulent octogenarians become the new youth,
leaving fingerprints in the linguist’s garden—
while all you’re looking forward to is for someone to tell you
what it means to be a proper grown-up.
Sometimes I return to the books of my youth.
They are the same and yet not quite,
partly because I read them in a different language then,
but also I have long since parted ways
with that whippersnapper.
In the comfort of our solitude,
there are no history books,
only diaries,
with no one to satisfy,
no difference to make,
so perhaps I should contract
some fashionable disease
as an excuse to stay in my room
and spend the remaining time
peeping at the next-door neighbours
from behind the curtain—
a family of magpies
going about their business.
After all, I’m mortal, like them,
and that’s the only hope.
kind of / sexy, all muscle & moves & luminous glow
‘Night Garbage’, Amy Shearn
Lilies are too morbid, apples too biblical—
am I drowning in literary obsession?
When I look out the window at orange vests
painting a disabled parking bay on the street,
I have to admit they might seem sexy,
but to be sure, I’d have to see
the garbagemen in Brooklyn first.
Whether you dream of finding out sandals
more interwoven and complete to impress someone
or to land a job as a court writer, once you decide
to let your verse out into the wild, you will learn
that in the transactional world of vernacular literature,
back-scratching is the foundation of the like economy,
and the algorithm is its angel of annihilation.
Which goes better with afternoon tea—
yellowcake or magpie?
Does a barber make the barbed wire
to crown a wooden head after the March equinox?
What’s my pleasure if you’re welcome
is never yours?
And so you explain the intricacies of English
for forty quid an hour, but truth be told,
the naive questions of a rebooted life novice
wouldn’t pique your curiosity enough
to answer the one he really wants to ask:
Oughtn’t you to be in love?
How convenient would it be to live in a cottage
next to a cemetery? After all, unfit for all those ghastly
conventionalities of days of yore as you are, it’s your choice
what matters to you, so you should never deny yourself
the simple pleasure of inadequacy just because a bench plaque
would be the only befitting abridgement of your meagre existence
after wandering through life at the speed of the alphabet.
hidden pilcrow 