When you find yourself vis-à-vis with the routine
horrors-turned-tattle, a walk down St Fittick’s might help,
even if the beheaded watcher’s house no longer guards
the graves from resurrectionists and unsolicited graffiti,
and you face either the leper squint or the rusting corpse
of a tanker abandoned in Nigg Bay. ‘But will it help?’
And how should I know? I’m only the poet.
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My resentments act as bookmarks
to the feminist writers occupying my bookshelves,
inappropriately labelled ‘the fair sex dome’,
but forgive me my inadequacy of thought—
I’m of the rugged gender.
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En réalité le satanisme a gagné. Satan s’est fait ingénu. Le mal se connaissant était moins affreux et plus près de la guérison que le mal s’ignorant. G. Sand inférieure à de Sade.
Notes sur «Les liaisons dangereuses», Charles Baudelaire
My neighbour leads a life of studious regularity
and doesn’t mind if George Sand is inferior to de Sade,
as long as he can perch on the scroll finial of the church across the street
to catch his breath between feedings of his chicks.
If only I were a magpie.
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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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Dear Strachey, while sharing, at least in spirit, some of the paraphernalia of cultivation—you had Baudelaire; I have T.S. Eliot—if only I had known you then and shared your outlook on marriage to begin with, and if my admiration for your intellectual finesse had passed beyond the tantamount to witnessing polyorchidism under an ultrasound examination, I might not have stepped into that sanctimonious staple just to regret it dearly afterwards. But I met you late in my aimless peregrinations, so everything turned out the way it did, and all that remains is to share one piece of wisdom—don’t trust vows without a prenup.
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‘War is nothing but a continuation of politics with the admixture of other means.’
Carl von Clausewitz, On War
We need children after war—
lots of them—
and so we need mothers and fathers.
…mothers and fathers…
Who would have thought: war—
a dating app,
available on all platforms.
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I lost sight of my neighbours
as their nest drowned in the linden leaves—
which is nothing unexpected with spring in full swing—
so for now I have to find some other source of entertainment,
or better yet, draw the curtains
so that I don’t become the target of snoopers:
all those flies bouncing off my window.
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Faith is a perishable good with a somewhat intimidating scent
of respectability, a late symbol of our exalted humilitude—
as if café au lait wasn’t enough—and it makes me think
of the last day of the Inquisition and of clerks burning old paperwork
and auctioning off no longer needed instruments of torture
to be repurposed as it fits.
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It started as an innocent jest made by a friend to lighten the mood after my bitter remarks on the shrinking job market and the fact that poetry is all but a hobby. He created a page with information about the next Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom, who in 2029 will replace the current holder of the position, Simon Armitage—apparently it’s supposed to be me. And while I am a poet, my less than modest readership clearly indicates that I’m nowhere near being called a professional, which is surely one of the many requirements of the job. Besides, I’m not even British. And yet…
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hidden pilcrow 