Sometimes I yearn for days with a gentle flavour,
like Thriday—marking the upcoming long weekend—
or a late birthday eve when I have to count out
a few dozen candles to decorate the cake.
I guess I’m starting to get tired of the daily toddling
from one lamppost to another, consumed by the desire
to bargain, whether it’s relationships in decay
or evening classes in applied thanatology.
What if the fate of humanity depended on a single, random act of a man,
no matter how insignificant—sort of like a Sunday parish raffle,
but with our very existence at stake?
Fairness aside, what are the chances we would survive such a trial?
Being a poet, not a statistician, I can’t really calculate the odds,
though since even on the battlefield there are occasional acts of kindness,
we might be just fine.
But if something like glueing a nail upright to a pavement slab
that I stumbled upon on my evening stroll is not an isolated incident,
then we are eternally screwed.
The varnished teenage deigan masks,
though lacking an artisan’s touch,
fight for the leading role on the main stage
of their little drama—a bus stop—only to become a trophy
in a desperate act of impersonating adults.
Call me a snob, but I simply can’t stand the aesthetic,
or rather the lack thereof. Maybe if it were the return of seventies glam,
but all I see are badly applied thick layers of makeup,
insanely long, tacky eyelashes, and exclamations
steamed in unfamiliar perfumed fumes.
Yet I remember the scent.
Is wrestling a paper in a desperate pursuit of words enough
to prove one has a chance to transcend an inanimate object?
After all, if there is nothing morbid about the first breath,
why would it be about the last one? We all know substitutes
are endless.
hidden pilcrow 