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.
It is such a decent vice to have,
or at least an interesting one,
like a minor stroke or veisalgia,
and once you’ve got over it,
you don’t even need a physician
or a chemist—just a solicitor
and perhaps a poet.
Unlike family evenings or passionate nights,
early mornings have rather poor patronage,
even if toned down with a cantrip of cuppa
spiked with a generous spoonful of saccharin
served by the saucy, pedantic wretch of ours
brazenly peeping through the open curtain.
I knew it was a fool’s play inventing words
that are not real, like ‘forever’ and ‘enough’,
but I never imagined you would actually burn
the dictionary—though I suppose that’s expected
when you consort with an arsonist—and leave
the kitchen table to grow somewhat too ample
for one measly setting at dawn.
Perhaps the sum of my anticipations has always been destined
to end in a dethronement of reason, even though I was meant to be anything
but a human body—a mere bagful of petards, subject to daily routines
and mundane sustenance practices—only to be born
without the indiscriminate approval of life
that is required to live one’s own fussy eulogy to the fullest,
or at all. Is that why they taught me Shakespeare
rather than Schopenhauer?
I had an unexpected visitor this morning. My next-door neighbour—
a magpie who had built a nest in the tree outside my living room window—
perched on the windowsill and watched me for a moment but soon returned
to its humble dwelling. I guess Vrikshasana wasn’t all that captivating,
and I looked completely harmless in the early spring sunlight—
a scarecrow behind the double glazing.
hidden pilcrow 