Whether it’s a tourniquet or a poultice,
small talk plays its part only if both parties believe
in the magic of innocuous prattle,
even if sometimes you have to destroy
evidence to the contrary—
no wonder an old heathen remains silent.
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‘There is something about adjectives
that makes one feel rather peckish’
was an opening line for a casual conversation
whose consequences, like death by misadventure
as a raree-show, lay between two words,
whispered at midnight with Nina Simone,
when you weren’t sure
if you were greeting a new day
or mourning the past one.
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From anacoluthon through zeugma,
Mr Honk savoured his grammatical incongruity
in the omnitude of the alphabet
as if linguistic phenomena were the draught that gave him life—
even if pronounced by a Doppler shift—
with an inclination to say ‘perhaps’ rather than ‘maybe’
and ‘indeed’ instead of a blunt ‘yes’,
which earned him the well-deserved title of snob—
a negligible price to pay for a stint in the temple of solitude—
the lost consort.
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How do you feel when you see a gutter snipe
coming from Ms Woolf’s pen, and is that shiver
a sign of elevated social awareness or the fact
that we keep the sentiment while updating the vocabulary—
something with ‘challenged’ at the end, perhaps—
just as the stack of cups next to the sink
is no longer clutter but a measuring device
that marks the passage of time?
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No one writes anymore
to Poste Restante
that the billowing gloom
of fluff and puff
says more about longing
than the pristine sky—
unfortunately relaxing—
like when a handful of pages
proves more than a thousand,
whether one follows Norval
or his father on the Grampian Hills.
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Mr Honk detested subtitles—
he always felt that the author either needed an excuse
for not coming up with a better title in the first place
or treated the readers like a bunch of halfwits,
which was mostly unrequited, since they had paid the charge,
tax included, and could only complain after having to deal
with his mental excursions—
yet Yethindra Vityala’s caught him
by surprise.
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Is there anything more dangerous than dissatisfied and irresponsible gods who don’t know what they want?
Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, Yuval Noah Harari
Little Gil and Frank have always been fastidious boys,
and that’s never changed, even after they got their pee-haitch-dees.
Now doctors Gamesh and Enstein play ‘I spy’ with a man
with soulful, if somewhat dispirited and unsympathetic, eyes,
pretending that someone is thinking about his future,
even though no one has ever told him that when it’s time to age,
a Deus is no less insouciant than a Neanderthal.
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Non est ad astra mollis e terris via.
Seneca, Hercules Furens
Chiefly British, often archaic, like a gobemouche
that found his snollygoster, Mr Honk wandered
the streets of the long-lost home town he no longer recognised
the buildings of—the trees were still the same, though, just mightier—
and muttered under his breath, ‘Signed, Kushim’; finding it ironic
that the first name ever recorded was that of an accountant, not a poet,
but in response he only heard the cries of the peacocks in the palace park—
a sensory room full of adjectified characters, heroes of the complex sentence
or the old man’s indifference, one calls the lost passion for the morass
of mundane concerns—knowing full well that he was nothing
but a talkative ape descendant facing the level three chaos:
per quietem ad terram.
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With his ever-changing
insatiable curiosity for detail,
at one point Mr Honk wished
to explore clefs on the staff
and chord progressions,
but if he had learnt anything
from his last music teacher,
it’s that the most humble
might easily turn out to be
the malevolent one.
No wonder he played
Le Carnaval des animaux
as a ‘largo doloroso’
with a perfect smile.
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hidden pilcrow 