Should you pity yourself as your confidence withers
and the bookshelves seem intimidating, there is no consolation
other than the words of an old grammarian
about the different inclinations of the human mind.
After all, you are but a victim of the economy
of language.
I wonder if the magpies building a nest in the tree outside my window
would care about Lenin’s invention,
or if the seagulls crying on the roof of the church across the street
would be fond of hashtagging their vaginas,
because if I were a woman,
I would probably feel offended today;
but since I’m not, I’d rather wait a few days
for free sake and a glorious view of youbutsu.
Perhaps one day we’ll finally find peace
beyond our genitals.
Sometimes you have to have faith in yourself,
even when the mirror screams ‘old and ugly’
and your desire for sex—meaningless or otherwise—
no longer goes beyond the topic of an article in a rag
casually opened while waiting at the hairdresser’s,
or so they say, and there may be some truth to it—
atheists decorate Christmas trees too, after all—
but it’s hard to shake the hand that just castrated you.
As insatiable as it is accidental,
who’d have thought life would be anything
but a mere inconvenience?
After all, when it comes to life, all we have to do
is sustain it until we produce offspring,
and then we are free
to perish.
I’ve heard that if you look like a duck
and you quack like a duck,
then you are a duck, even if the rest of the flock
sees you as an odd—let alone a dead—one,
and yet, the eccentrics and the hopeless aside,
few things feel as unwelcoming as the world
of yellow rubber.
Some flowers bloom only at night,
so they don’t have to manufacture fine days,
and while sunlight might embellish their lives,
they know that better is the enemy
of good.
Life is a curse—a sentient one all the more so—yet we cling tenaciously
to this self-perpetuating whim of fate, failing to see that we are nothing
but victims of Stockholm syndrome in a vicious circle of reproduction,
with the upshot of comatose reason as a fig leaf for weaponised intimacy;
nothing that an episode of hentai and a box of tissues wouldn’t have solved.
If only I had known this all those years ago, or better yet, if I had never
been born to have to learn it.
If someone asked me if I was happy, I honestly wouldn’t know
what to say—not because I don’t know myself,
but because I don’t know what I’m being asked.
Happiness is one of those buzzwords that’s been around since time immemorial
and supposedly puts us above the paramecium, to name just one,
but I feel like we would have understood temporal multidimensionality sooner,
even though physics professors who study it are few and far between;
yet it can’t simply be reduced to an exercise in stale semantics.
So what is this chimaera we chase to the point of obsession,
or should I say, this phantom itch we don’t know how to scratch?
Whatever it is, there will always be those all too happy
to make a killing on the back of it.
I read somewhere that the four-dimensional
topology of the human body is trivial,
and I thought there must be something to it,
because when I look at my feeble carcass
in the mirror after a lukewarm shower,
I can’t shake the feeling that I’m looking
at a misshaped earthworm on a rainy day;
the latter, at least, has first loosened the soil,
not their tongue.
hidden pilcrow 