Who do you call on a foggy morning
if you stumble upon a body: a coroner
or a stationer? But, while still puzzling,
Mr Honk’s swift entanglement in a ream
wouldn’t have posed such a dilemma
if only he’d decided whether he had
woken up next to a cold cadaver
or his oeuvre.
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Like an indiscriminate drop cap,
Mr Honk sat within the margins
and ran deep into the paragraph,
for he had not been born to fit
into any of the respectable social roles—
nor was he ever meant to—
doomed to disappoint even if he tried,
yet he felt a smidgen of nostalgia
at discovering that he was not alone
in finding most novels to be
impossibly futile affairs.
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Taking advantage of the ever-bright evenings
and equally ablaze early mornings,
Mr Honk tried to draught a civilised society
where masturbation, like potty training,
was just another hygiene practice, not at all so
curiously repulsive in a bourgeois gentilhomme
as to end up as a full-dress performance
in front of a mirror in a timid Lutyens.
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Caught in a tangle of subordinate clauses,
Mr Honk often pictured himself as a complex sentence
turned a garden path, a monochromatic hostage
of perception, a momentary anticipation
that ran its course quicker than one could say Dieu sait qui,
yet it never occurred to him to consult a local grammarian.
Perhaps he feared a war of attrition
between prescriptive and descriptive grammar,
or maybe he was simply too lazy to leave
the marginalia.
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A sesquipedalian collector by nature,
for the gallimaufry of days to come,
Mr Honk chose the simplest vocabulary,
consisting of only two petite words,
so he would always know what to say
at the end.
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We never mean to pry—
when Mr Honk said that,
he wanted it to sound convincing;
he wanted to sound convincing;
he wanted to sound
convinced.
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To walk about naked
after fifty years of tête-à-tête
with a pillow
felt like effete complacency
that went beyond certain obligations,
yet Mr Honk perceived it as no more
than monotonous staccato
measured by an hourglass
rather than a metronome,
suspecting that life’s last curiosity
might actually turn out to be an endnote
page that contains nothing
but a bunch of ibids from an unknown source,
a mild inconvenience,
one could say,
after doing one’s utmost
and still failing to figure out the function
one was supposed to perform.
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Born into Mickiewicz’s,
living Shakespeare’s,
Mr Honk didn’t truly belong
to either language,
but he still tried hard
to meet all
the singular beings—
each one its own portmanteau—
that inhabited the block
of flats he lived in
or perhaps just
the bookshelf.
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Raised in a facetious milieu—
like a delayed palindrome with an imposing façade
yet very gentle and kind—
Mr Honk decided to be cheerful for a change
and wash radishes for breakfast
without the usual wry contempt
for corporeality,
although he knew it was a whim,
not a Nicomachean attempt.
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hidden pilcrow 