While remaining influenced by the grammar of motives, we never failed
to satisfy that morbid curiosity of ours, despite the awakening resistance
to unsettling habits, because of pride that could hardly bear the modesty
of demeanour. ‘So what?’ you ask, reading Horace or Ovid. ‘Barbarians
like us, unless they delighted in words, would admit that life is a process
of elimination.’
Perhaps we learn by constant repetition, but even when my nose bleeds, it is nothing
but watered-down ink dripping onto a creaky wooden floor covered with a cheap rug
pretending to be tapis polonais. One glance at Buster Keaton’s face, like a bookmark
marking scenes with bygone meanings, and I already know that there is no comfort
in the last feeling I want to experience.
I don’t watch films any more, just distant memories
of films I have already seen. Sometimes I even think
that perhaps Roundhay Garden Scene is all I need.
After all, what really draws my quotidian pictures
is silence.
I wake up for a brief moment from indefinite slumber just to shed a tear
over trifles that somehow slipped out of my reach, hoping that I can stay
like this for a little longer, and it doesn’t even hurt when I strike a chord
easy enough to play along, although sometimes I wonder how it could be
that these moments that are mine and mine alone all of a sudden turn me
all defensive, even though I know that your ugliness is an acquired trait
and there is no way of saying if I ever have what it takes to brush it off
just because it’s my imagination.
hidden pilcrow 