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.
Tag: existential musings
Reflections
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.
The divide
I’ve only ever talked to myself, even if the words were directed at you,
and you wouldn’t hear my voice anyway, as you aren’t here—you never were,
now that I’ve realised that in order for you to appear before me,
I must first dramatise you, assign you a genre, and only then deconstruct you,
finger by finger and toe by toe, until there is nothing left but a bare midriff
with a navel scar, the only evidence that we were once one.
Not much of a lesson
I had a stew
made with butternut squash,
sweet potatoes,
and sun-dried tomatoes
for dinner tonight—a humble result
of emptying the fridge into a pot
in the hope that the final product
would be edible—while listening to Joni
when the thought came to me
how utterly ridiculous creatures we are,
stuffing our mouths
only to excrete some hours later,
repeating it over and over again like markers
in an indefinite stretch of time between now and then,
and in the end none of us is any wiser;
everyone is just making it up as they go,
but perhaps some are better
at pretending
that they know clouds.
Nostalgia
Of all the fallacies, Golden Age thinking is the one
I could least likely fall victim to, since I am a poet,
and being miserable is in a poet’s job description,
whether it involves the present, the future, or the past.
And what is this happiness everyone’s talking about
anyway, let alone how and where to actually find it?
If anything, not having been born would be the only
glimmer of happiness I can think of, but it’s too late.
hidden pilcrow 