I have no particular thoughts
on logic, which is logical
since I’m not a scholar—not a smidgen
of salonnière upbringing either—
yet the wainscot brothel in my study
lacks no Montague, or Boole, or Frege.
Ultimately, I could only devote myself
to discovering how many gods died
in a demitasse of mocha.
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A coward, a lazy and selfish one—a man
(doesn’t sound particularly bad in earnest,
a little wry, perhaps)—a flat noun, striving
to define the gap between ‘me’ and ‘mine’,
yet barely passing by the em dash, like the man
of every Raphaelite and Ogilvy, only dozing off
in old age, never quite striking the right chord.
And I’m still not sure if that’s hubris or abjection.
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I guess I’m no longer looking for anything—
anything in particular, at least
(subject to the occasional surprise).
Perhaps that’s why I have settled on films
with Miss Kendrick—somewhere along the way,
I left behind a pile of first-edition hardbacks,
and my collection of Ikea nutcrackers fell victim
to the financial proceedings—the final stage
of love.
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A lifelong cinephile,
I no longer watch films—
I’m perfectly content
with trailers.
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I recently got new neighbours.
After the energetic magpie family moved out,
the tree outside my window was quiet for a while.
Now a pair of pigeons has appeared—
though not high up in the tree like the magpies,
but on a branch right next to my window—
yet they’re barely noticeable, without fuss
taking shifts in performing
their incubation duties.
Even their cooing is a rare occurrence.
They are perfectly forgettable
breeding machines
some call a symbol of love.
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I have always believed that boredom is a symptom of the laziness of the mind, for brilliant minds are self-sufficient, as seen in the case of Richard Feynman, who remained lucid, mentally active, and undisturbed even by the absence of sensory input in John C. Lilly’s isolation tank. And although I’m far from that level of acumen myself, I’ve often quipped that I’m never bored because I share my time with a very intelligent person—myself. Besides, I tend to keep books close at hand. (And speaking of books and great minds, I’ve long found it fascinating when intellectuals claim that a particular book changed their life—only to then have a flash of insight: nothing like that has ever happened to me, so either I’m not easily impressed, or I’m simply too dim to grasp what I read.)
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qui dolorem ipsum, quia dolor sit
De finibus bonorum et malorum, Marcus Tullius Cicero
How can I not pity
the old beggar Cicero
for his most read text
being Lorem ipsum?
But I guess that suffices
for an indifficile reader
content with the life
of a tourist—myself.
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With a vague idea of the age of winnocence,
Mr Honk stumbled upon the most delightful insult:
strange creatures with a few feathers
where brains should be—and it only took it a century
to reach his bookshelf.
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There is nothing like father-son bonding
over car washing on Saturday afternoon—
even if rendered futile by the torrential rain—
on the long list of childhood gaieties we’ll try
to forget for the rest of our lives.
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hidden pilcrow 