We never mean to pry—
when Mr Honk said that,
he wanted it to sound convincing;
he wanted to sound convincing;
he wanted to sound
convinced.
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Category: English poetry
Varnish
To walk about naked
after fifty years of tête-à-tête
with a pillow
felt like effete complacency
that went beyond certain obligations,
yet Mr Honk perceived it as no more
than monotonous staccato
measured by an hourglass
rather than a metronome,
suspecting that life’s last curiosity
might actually turn out to be an endnote
page that contains nothing
but a bunch of ibids from an unknown source,
a mild inconvenience,
one could say,
after doing one’s utmost
and still failing to figure out the function
one was supposed to perform.
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To meet all
Born into Mickiewicz’s,
living Shakespeare’s,
Mr Honk didn’t truly belong
to either language,
but he still tried hard
to meet all
the singular beings—
each one its own portmanteau—
that inhabited the block
of flats he lived in
or perhaps just
the bookshelf.
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For a change
Raised in a facetious milieu—
like a delayed palindrome with an imposing façade
yet very gentle and kind—
Mr Honk decided to be cheerful for a change
and wash radishes for breakfast
without the usual wry contempt
for corporeality,
although he knew it was a whim,
not a Nicomachean attempt.
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Corpullation
While rummaging through the cupboards
full of semitransparent containers and ancestral dust,
Mr Honk, though immaterial, was reflecting
on the layer of flesh over his bones
and whether it wasn’t an inch too thick,
like the hollow walls without insulation
that separated him from the clamour
of his alleged sins, interspersed with inductions
on emotional economy, and all the books read
and reread over and over again, through generations,
to battle the excruciating boredom of the days
of conscience, only to be more agreeable
about the difference between a roman à clef
and a secret journal.
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Sprechstimme
Imagine being handed a jar of gobstoppers and a soda
when you were expecting an Époisses de Bourgogne
with a well-aged Sauternes, or better yet, misreading
Mills & Boon for Faber & Faber at the treen precipice
of Waterstones’ shelving, all because of Koit performed
by a Pierrot ensemble of seagulls, magpies, and crows,
when sleep hygiene wasn’t your forte to begin with.
People tend to call it everyday prose.
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Paris blues
Spiced with a pinch of Rabelais,
Mr Honk felt somewhat humanised—
despite his lack of a moral compass
and the residual heat in the bedding—
as long as there was an abundance
of a certain tincture and a cushion
of the seething mass.
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Other phraseology
Despite occasional incoherences,
Mr Honk attached a great deal of importance
to clarity of thought as well as the blacksmith’s boy,
refrigerated banana peels, and other phraseology,
and it always amused him when people
took everything he said at face value
just because it was in verse.
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Life’s hesitation
When every day seemed a cause célèbre
and there were no old papers to recover the truth from
once the dust of ages had rendered them immune
from scandal recorded onto shellac discs,
everyone would feel a tad titchy. No wonder
Mr Honk felt on edge every time he prepared
his bacon and eggs.
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hidden pilcrow 