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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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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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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Mr Honk suddenly felt the urge to write a letter,
only to end up writing a whole four and freezing
after that affectionate salutation when he realised
he had no addressee.
In his juvenile days he’d most likely write to Santa,
but now a bottle message seemed the only option,
though he was out of Diamant Bleu, and there was
the matter of pollution.
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As life’s main ingredient,
truism hardly belongs to the compartment
labelled ‘imponderabilia’, yet that is precisely
where Mr Honk tends to place it,
but that’s hardly anything out of the ordinary
when one considers his other eccentricities,
as when, for instance, he reaches the place
that was the sole reason for reading a book
only to pause, much like the faithful
who linger in the vestibule
to read the parish announcements
and then dip their fingertips
in the holy water in the aspersorium
to make the sign of the cross
before joining a coryphée in the matronaeum.
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I find reading The Letters of Lytton Strachey a great deal of pleasure, and yet it is like listening to a telephone conversation where all you can hear is the man standing in front of you with the receiver in his hand. For that reason, I look back on reading the correspondence between Stanisław Lem and Sławomir Mrożek with all the more nostalgia. It has been a solid ten years since I last held this voluminous tome in my hands. Perhaps it’s time to return once again to their wit and wisdom.
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Mr Honk always wondered what was expected of him.
Something, for sure; otherwise, what would be the point?
Especially since, despite his name, he was a rather quiet fella,
without much of an ambition of his own or a seminal act
of cowardice—nothing beyond low tea with the provost
Barbariccia or collecting the whole Everyman’s Library
and actually reading it, and all because of a hunch
that there may be maybe in the sure.
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… when playing mornings, how easy it is
to confuse a tuning fork with a piano
or Die Zwitscher-Maschine drawing silence.
Mr Honk’s hand hesitated for a moment
as he put a period after the closing sentence
of the belated valedictory obituary
clacked out on one of the inherited typewriters—
he couldn’t shake the feeling that he was
a ninny with impostor syndrome,
like his maisonette that had everything
but the essential furniture.
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Me: There may be maybe in the sure
Google AI: The phrase “There may be maybe in the sure” is a grammatically incorrect and nonsensical statement. The words “may be” and “maybe” are distinct and have different grammatical functions. “May be” is a verb phrase, while “maybe” is an adverb. The sentence attempts to combine them in a way that does not make logical sense.
Me: 🤣 🤣 🤣
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hidden pilcrow 