If only I had been heartless
and thus never born,
perhaps the photographer would never have taken pictures
of the funeral procession my parents’ wedding was.
I always wondered where those grim faces came from
until one day one of the photos fell out of the album,
and I saw the date written on the back—a quick calculation explained everything.
After all, casarse de penalty, as the Spanish call it, is no cause for celebration,
and that’s about all I know
about love.
Instant love costs little—a cinema ticket
or, better even, a subscription to a streaming service;
and then you can watch her, for as long as you live,
in the farewell to the circus, wondering
whether time was a healer or a disease,
with her desire for love, expressed in a foreign language,
yet as familiar as the sight of a brush against her bare shoulder,
something you also once did, long ago, to someone
you can barely even remember.
Being a poet pays nothing—that’s probably why I also write prudent stories
in TypeScript and Java—and I wrote my very first stanza out of love anyway,
but she just laughed at me—the girl, I mean, not love, as love has no feelings
and will leave you at the first wink of a passing globetrotter so you can learn
some legal jargon and that no one fancies a homebody in this brave new world
of dating algorithms. But I guess I could always become a magician—it worked
for Mrs. Münchgstettner—if it weren’t for my stage fright and the conviction
that nothing the world had to offer I couldn’t find in the free verse and ragtime
reclined on my sofa.
I’ve heard that lovers are like buses—you have to wait for a little while,
and another one comes along; though I can’t help but add: unless the line
is closed for good, while you, unaware of it, are stuck at the bus stop,
tapping your feet and nervously checking a watch, afraid that your ride
will pass you by the moment you’ve given up and started walking.
Torn between the four-volume Forcellini and Van Reed’s ‘Waei Shōwa,’
the casual libertine relishes the metre of ‘Pēdīcābō ego vōs et irrumābō’
while not shying away from the formative influence of ‘Urotsukidōji.’
But while he indulges in Roman literotica and the occasional hentai,
there is one guilty pleasure he would never admit—seeking the longest
sentence in ‘Der Tod des Vergil.’
Love is blind, or so they say,
and though they picture a blindfolded Cupid,
none seems more blind than the motherly one
—when she shrugs off her grown-up son’s
beating of his younger sister as nothing
but an innocent sibling quarrel.
Maybe that would have been true
when they were toddlers and one hit the other
with a plastic shovel while playing in the sandbox,
but not now, when he is a six-foot giant
bullying her because of her love
for another woman.
If there were a healing cream for the soul,
like the one I use for eczema, perhaps I could stop scratching the itch
after you left (you weren’t expecting anything more, like pain, let alone despair, were you?).
Oh well, the occasional rom-com or dramedy will do instead, I guess.
After all, sometimes it takes more courage to step back from life
than to cling to the roles it imposes.
My mistress, the soul, has never transcended
her affair with my ever-decaying soma,
like an old lady to the bitter end watering flowers
on her abusive husband’s grave. And yet, as I learn
old man tricks—an afternoon game of dominoes
and speaking fluent pigeon—and can curb my urges,
she still insists on one more shot at l’amour vrai.
Perhaps a tad of The Swan of Avon will do the trick.
After all, nothing soothes the soul like a verse
after a day of debauchery.
How long does it take to live fifty years?
Longer than the blink of an eye, but not as long as you might expect,
sounds about right. Then come all the accretions that stick like a crust
until you can’t tell them apart from your own skin. And when one day
you no longer cry over the shape of your heart, all that’s left is regret
that she threw away your perfectly good wellies, along with the name
you had traded for all the wrong reasons.
hidden pilcrow 