Perhaps the sum of my anticipations has always been destined
to end in a dethronement of reason, even though I was meant to be anything
but a human body—a mere bagful of petards, subject to daily routines
and mundane sustenance practices—only to be born
without the indiscriminate approval of life
that is required to live one’s own fussy eulogy to the fullest,
or at all. Is that why they taught me Shakespeare
rather than Schopenhauer?
As a lowland creature of wrinkles and grey hair,
who reads the—handily predigested—Übermensch preacher
while doing daily workouts on the exercise bike
in the comfort of my spacious living room
rather than jotting down thoughts while hiking the Fex Valley,
I wonder if I have earned the right to complain.
After all, I never asked for this ordeal,
although compared to many, you might say
my life is little more than a hassle. The thing is,
even a drop of water can be unbearable—
ask de Marsiliis.
A happy life is the one I never had,
but saying so may suggest I’m unfortunate
or ungrateful, either assuming no control
over fate or implying being endowed
with something of value in the first place,
as if a homo perditus were destined
for something other than a stint with a parasite
with angelic—if superficial—features.
I wonder if the magpies building a nest in the tree outside my window
would care about Lenin’s invention,
or if the seagulls crying on the roof of the church across the street
would be fond of hashtagging their vaginas,
because if I were a woman,
I would probably feel offended today;
but since I’m not, I’d rather wait a few days
for free sake and a glorious view of youbutsu.
Perhaps one day we’ll finally find peace
beyond our genitals.
Some flowers bloom only at night,
so they don’t have to manufacture fine days,
and while sunlight might embellish their lives,
they know that better is the enemy
of good.
Life is a curse—a sentient one all the more so—yet we cling tenaciously
to this self-perpetuating whim of fate, failing to see that we are nothing
but victims of Stockholm syndrome in a vicious circle of reproduction,
with the upshot of comatose reason as a fig leaf for weaponised intimacy;
nothing that an episode of hentai and a box of tissues wouldn’t have solved.
If only I had known this all those years ago, or better yet, if I had never
been born to have to learn it.
If someone asked me if I was happy, I honestly wouldn’t know
what to say—not because I don’t know myself,
but because I don’t know what I’m being asked.
Happiness is one of those buzzwords that’s been around since time immemorial
and supposedly puts us above the paramecium, to name just one,
but I feel like we would have understood temporal multidimensionality sooner,
even though physics professors who study it are few and far between;
yet it can’t simply be reduced to an exercise in stale semantics.
So what is this chimaera we chase to the point of obsession,
or should I say, this phantom itch we don’t know how to scratch?
Whatever it is, there will always be those all too happy
to make a killing on the back of it.
Life is a no-win situation,
at least when, wrapped in a blanket, wearing two cardigans, I fight
the cold and my own words.
At first, I didn’t mean the inevitability of death
(mortality is actually a silver lining so few can appreciate),
but our innate, boredom-inducing insatiability—the mother of all vices,
or at least many of them.
But then the Irishman said, ‘Something will be mine wherever I am,’
and it struck me that after all these years and places,
one thing has never left me—my guilt.
I watch Baroness Reid of Cardowan and wonder
if this is what it feels like—dying
of life: one by one you lose your passions
and learn the names of flowers along the way.
But why then would you grieve in a morgue
instead of a maternity ward?
hidden pilcrow 