I like mornings
of overcast skies
when the excess sunlight
doesn’t hinder reading
by the window
of the Château de Silling—
a blushing quinquagenarian
falling victim to a hassle
most people call life.
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Category: English poetry
My poetry written in English
The forgotten question
Looking at the painting by an unknown artist
that he had once bought at a flea market,
Mr Honk tried to understand why
the painter titled it The Square Root of Two,
even though it was clearly a Klauber triangle.
But then it reminded him of John’s opening line,
which, stripped of the divine references,
always made him ask,
‘How many oceans hold a tear?’,
knowing we had spent so long searching for the answer—
we had forgotten what the question was.
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A song
What is it that keeps me attached
to the words? I live and learn
that Nature knows no sorrow—
maybe I shouldn’t either—
and has no use of ‘assuage’.
Perhaps the well-spoken have it easier,
but how would I know? After all, longing
is a wordless song.
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Personal velocity
You said the living should not envy
the dead, and yet here we are, wondering
how many tomorrows today is worth,
trying to find comfort in the torment
or watching Grosse Pointe Blank together
because there’s always time to be
disappointed or ask what life in progress is.
But what if all that were nothing
but splitting hairs, only to realise
there was no hair to split to begin with?
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Growing up
[…] for first, children and all other animals share in voluntary action but not in Moral Choice;
Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle
If it weren’t for the distractions
we used to preoccupy our dishevelled pates,
we all would eventually come to the conclusion
that life is a pointless exercise not worth the hassle
and simply end it. After all, even a horse
in a gown and a mortarboard, pulling a load
of beliefs, conjectures, hypotheses and theories—
as fallible as they come—must one day join
the grownups in a leaden paradise,
inventing yet another version
of the hourglass.
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The blind eat many a fly
My name is Peeping Tom—
caught in the little drama
of that insular open-air museum
unwilling to admit it punches above its weight,
I can’t imagine calling myself anything else
after a few weeks of reading The Letters
of Lytton Strachey—and yet even a subaltern
yearns to be fond of something
beyond the mathematics of conduct,
where to simply live would be nothing
but stating the obvious (we try to warm ourselves
by the soul’s residual heat, only such a fireplace is no more—
we once replaced it with a radiator).
But if life has no inherent meaning,
it’s up to me to invent one for myself—
a cup of chilled hemlockshake should suffice.
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Renascence
I had a wife once;
such an unfortunate slip of judgement,
or perhaps a twist of fate,
since the final years—
not as verbose, but ripe—
have made me a poet
I’ve never been before.
I imagine that’s the feeling
of a butcher on the opening night
of the Delicatessen.
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Quiet revolution
One’s life, driven by an electricity tariff
and the moody weather that suits one well,
as it provides the perfect excuse to exercise
the principle of energy conservation—
with the exception of an umbrella
that sometimes longs for a shower—
is nothing short of blatant sacrilege
in the world of aggregate demand.
But then what’s the alternative—
scorched earth? We’ve already practised
burning down libraries, remember?
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Men like us
Cary Grant made men seem like a good idea.
Cary Grant: A Class Apart, Graham McCann
You can live one word at a time,
but it takes a sentence to be convincing,
unless you plan to play South by Southeast
with the miraculously reborn Branjelina.
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hidden pilcrow 