Like the dandelions and linden flowers,
Mr Honk was used to being seated below the salt;
in fact, he preferred the less exposed accommodation—
though still in the vicinity of the sangfroid suavity of people
of intellect, individuals of all genders and none—
where he could freely nibble the refined exchange
of Latin binomials between Equus monocerus
and Musca domestica.
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What does it mean to have a sense of humour
in a world where even the freckled can’t tell jokes
about freckles? Like a conjurer’s missing hat,
internalising ‘the great stone face’ in recall
might just be the silent answer,
even if apocryphal.
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Whether it’s young, in dire need of leniency,
or old enough to be forgiven or forgotten,
it’s not life that is alluring; it’s the photographs
that we take of it.
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Who do you call on a foggy morning
if you stumble upon a body: a coroner
or a stationer? But, while still puzzling,
Mr Honk’s swift entanglement in a ream
wouldn’t have posed such a dilemma
if only he’d decided whether he had
woken up next to a cold cadaver
or his oeuvre.
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Every definition is a consequence.
Every consequence is a contribution.
Every contribution is a context.
Every context is a definition.
So what you are trying to say is
that every definition is a definition,
but I guess you wouldn’t settle
for another tautology, like the one
about love?
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Like an indiscriminate drop cap,
Mr Honk sat within the margins
and ran deep into the paragraph,
for he had not been born to fit
into any of the respectable social roles—
nor was he ever meant to—
doomed to disappoint even if he tried,
yet he felt a smidgen of nostalgia
at discovering that he was not alone
in finding most novels to be
impossibly futile affairs.
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Taking advantage of the ever-bright evenings
and equally ablaze early mornings,
Mr Honk tried to draught a civilised society
where masturbation, like potty training,
was just another hygiene practice, not at all so
curiously repulsive in a bourgeois gentilhomme
as to end up as a full-dress performance
in front of a mirror in a timid Lutyens.
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Caught in a tangle of subordinate clauses,
Mr Honk often pictured himself as a complex sentence
turned a garden path, a monochromatic hostage
of perception, a momentary anticipation
that ran its course quicker than one could say Dieu sait qui,
yet it never occurred to him to consult a local grammarian.
Perhaps he feared a war of attrition
between prescriptive and descriptive grammar,
or maybe he was simply too lazy to leave
the marginalia.
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A sesquipedalian collector by nature,
for the gallimaufry of days to come,
Mr Honk chose the simplest vocabulary,
consisting of only two petite words,
so he would always know what to say
at the end.
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hidden pilcrow 