With the abundance of days,
a true existence is never far
for an honest person—
only twenty years away
or a page
if you’re lucky.
But as a piano teacher is not a pianist—
let alone a composer,
especially if their instrument,
crammed into the corner of the room,
is reduced to a mere flowerpot stand—
a man is only as humane.
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Never sure he needed a prompter
or a ponce, Mr Honk was desperate
to play the farewells and greetings
as if they were merely exercises
in elocution or, at most, ill-equipped,
restless harbingers of piles—
just another great Scottish tragedy
of arse.
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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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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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A French and an American student
meet on a train to Vienna and fall in love
sounds oddly familiar, like a pitch
for a romcom scribbled on a napkin
in one of Tinseltown’s shabby bars
that somehow turned into an epic trilogy,
and your only regret is that you were
neither the scribbler nor the lover,
but at least you’re holding on to something
real.
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Being alive by proxy—
subject to semantic bleaching—
is the one particular burden that is mine
and mine alone, yet
since I mostly read old men
with long beards and moustaches,
I don’t feel particularly overwhelmed.
That is, until I’m singed by the flare
of tone contagion, which leaves no choice
but to close the book and get out
in the real world.
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To sit at your desk in a cheerful disposition
is quite the illegitimate thought
when you pose as a harbinger of sorrow.
You are in the business of authenticity, after all.
And once your words leave the printing press,
you have to be even more careful—
a stain on a page never sells well,
whether it’s a bleeding nose
or heart.
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[…] the point of disagreement is not that I like his body better than he likes mine, but that he likes my mind less than I like his.
Lytton Strachey, from a letter to Leonard Woolf
I don’t believe in unicorns
and beautiful boys entering the picture mid-spring
to redeem love—
or whatever that spree in meadowland is called—
only to turn yet another string of random labels
that our days need to progress
from one misstep to the next.
Besides, I’m not well-adjusted—I wish I were,
or perhaps not; maybe it’s better the way I am—
unlike all the pre-highbrows walking down Charing Cross Road
on rainy Sundays; I’m still struggling with the difference
between pleasing you and joining your tribe.
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I can’t stand waffling on
and have always appreciated the brevity of style,
but even for me a simple ‘I love you’ won’t cut it anymore—
I’ve learnt my lesson.
Perhaps next time just say
nothing,
whoever you are.
hidden pilcrow 