hidden pilcrow

i was six when i learned to read
letters and i did not need to speak
ever again. so i thought, if i knew
how to read notes, i would not need
to hear, and if i knew how to read
braille, i would not need to see.
and even now, forty years later,
i am still pensive at the mention
of dawn in robe of saffron.

old actors play old people.
they know how to ask,
is realism a thing?,
and how to be amazed
that someone is listening.

old people are old actors.
they know that asking
is as scary as ever,
and the next morning
is just that, a morning.

and they know how
to smile.

if life is a fatal
sexually transmitted disease
then i am nothing
more than the sum
of my weaknesses,
injuries and ailments,
an absent clause
in evanescence.
and i am okay with that.
with one caveat, i am
a congenital liar.

i was born with a broken heart.
it gave me a rather dubious gift
of visibility, the label of unfitness
in an act of childish brutality. that
is when i learned what fear is,
the real one and the imaginary.

i was born with a broken heart
and believed that what is already
broken cannot be broken again.
then you came and i learned that
naivety is the original sin with
no forgiveness.

I tolerate DEVIANTS because I have to.
I don’t like and don’t respect because I can.

a statement found on a social network

poetry written by life
has the best punch lines.
like this furious tirade
on perverts under the text
of someone who wrote
that he is proud to be homo
sapiens.

i have seen people kill themselves
without dying, some elderly, some
simply old and all just tired. each
of them a fugitive from an unsaid
abbey. each with their own sense
of briefness inscribed upon them.
not one old enough to finally order
a pint of lager.

regretting leaving my hermitage
for collegium maius, i do not curse
you but the drowsiness of the lecture
hall and our confused impressions.
after all, who could have foreseen
that my desires would crash against
your aversions, or that your great lust
for adventure would collide with my
austerity in life. the naivety of a young
faith in idealized feeling rarely obeys
common sense.

For death is nothing but the origin of life,
as life is the compensation of death.

A. C. Grayling, The Good Book

the winter of my birth
gave me my first breath
of cold air and nature
at rest. i often fell asleep
to the croaking of rooks,
and the touch of white
marked me with a love
of simplicity. i was my
own, still unwritten
fulfilment.

the winter of my death
will most likely drown
in the rain and the crying
of seagulls. but although
i like the grey of granite,
please cover my naked
silence in a jute cloth
and bury it in a barren
field with a seedling
of the tree of life.