As insatiable as it is accidental,
who’d have thought life would be anything
but a mere inconvenience?
After all, when it comes to life, all we have to do
is sustain it until we produce offspring,
and then we are free
to perish.
Category: English poetry
My poetry written in English
Birds of a feather
I’ve heard that if you look like a duck
and you quack like a duck,
then you are a duck, even if the rest of the flock
sees you as an odd—let alone a dead—one,
and yet, the eccentrics and the hopeless aside,
few things feel as unwelcoming as the world
of yellow rubber.
The nocturnals
Some flowers bloom only at night,
so they don’t have to manufacture fine days,
and while sunlight might embellish their lives,
they know that better is the enemy
of good.
A bitter muffin topped with a golden birthday wish
Life is a curse—a sentient one all the more so—yet we cling tenaciously
to this self-perpetuating whim of fate, failing to see that we are nothing
but victims of Stockholm syndrome in a vicious circle of reproduction,
with the upshot of comatose reason as a fig leaf for weaponised intimacy;
nothing that an episode of hentai and a box of tissues wouldn’t have solved.
If only I had known this all those years ago, or better yet, if I had never
been born to have to learn it.
Happiness
If someone asked me if I was happy, I honestly wouldn’t know
what to say—not because I don’t know myself,
but because I don’t know what I’m being asked.
Happiness is one of those buzzwords that’s been around since time immemorial
and supposedly puts us above the paramecium, to name just one,
but I feel like we would have understood temporal multidimensionality sooner,
even though physics professors who study it are few and far between;
yet it can’t simply be reduced to an exercise in stale semantics.
So what is this chimaera we chase to the point of obsession,
or should I say, this phantom itch we don’t know how to scratch?
Whatever it is, there will always be those all too happy
to make a killing on the back of it.
Reflections
I read somewhere that the four-dimensional
topology of the human body is trivial,
and I thought there must be something to it,
because when I look at my feeble carcass
in the mirror after a lukewarm shower,
I can’t shake the feeling that I’m looking
at a misshaped earthworm on a rainy day;
the latter, at least, has first loosened the soil,
not their tongue.
January
Life is a no-win situation,
at least when, wrapped in a blanket, wearing two cardigans, I fight
the cold and my own words.
At first, I didn’t mean the inevitability of death
(mortality is actually a silver lining so few can appreciate),
but our innate, boredom-inducing insatiability—the mother of all vices,
or at least many of them.
But then the Irishman said, ‘Something will be mine wherever I am,’
and it struck me that after all these years and places,
one thing has never left me—my guilt.
Falling for my hamster’s vet
I watched ‘Language Lessons’ last night,
and honestly, if my Spanish teacher had been Natalie Morales,
I would have fallen in love too, but then again,
what if Imogen Poots had followed through on her original plan
and become a veterinary surgeon? If I had gone to her
to get my hamster neutered (not that I have one),
would I have even noticed her, let alone fallen for?
So here’s the question: What are the origins of attraction?
(And for the record, I find Ms. Poots to be a stunning beauty,
but that’s beside the point—or is it?)
The divide
I’ve only ever talked to myself, even if the words were directed at you,
and you wouldn’t hear my voice anyway, as you aren’t here—you never were,
now that I’ve realised that in order for you to appear before me,
I must first dramatise you, assign you a genre, and only then deconstruct you,
finger by finger and toe by toe, until there is nothing left but a bare midriff
with a navel scar, the only evidence that we were once one.
hidden pilcrow 