Have you ever been to an orgy? You bet I have, and it was epic.
Imagine ‘Stiffed’ ‘Homo Deus’ ravaging the rough space between
‘Being and Nothingness’ and the ‘Backlash’ aftermath when thick
‘Sex and Destiny’ marked ‘The Obstacle Race’ wearing nothing
but ‘The Madwoman’s Underclothes’ with ‘No Logo’. ‘Arguably,’
one might take this as an assault ‘On Certainty,’ but what is wrong
with a bit of reflective debauchery in ‘A Room of One’s Own?’
Window-shopping on Sunday afternoon was like adjectives attached to a noun when you say,
“This is beautiful,” so I could respond, “Nonsense, you are beautiful; this is just expensive.”
Then you hummed Come Away with Me, but the last time I touched your toes, they were cold,
and the bus left empty as you never wrote me that song. Only the rain has never let me down.
Not that I am being overly parsimonious,
but is not our alphabet somewhat extravagant?
Why not emulate the Rotokas’ twelve letters?
I am sure they can still construct the whole
of human knowledge out of them.
Reduced to a poem, to a world in terms of words, if only read like a distant memory
of the Lost Generation—witnesses of Verdun and the Somme—it can still shake off
the thoughts of cluster bombs and grain tanks hit by missiles in the port of Odessa.
But forced by the bare-chested madman to stop fantasising about the end of history,
the world may face the end of itself, ordered from a secret nuclear bunker in the name
of that same history.
I know we always assume that parental love is a given,
but have you ever wondered what it would be like to be
the reason your parents have been at each other’s throats
for as long as you can remember, just because the distance
between their wedding anniversary and your birthday
is oddly close? Personally, I feel like I would rather never
have been born than bear such a burden, but it so happened
that I was, and trust me, it rips every bit of light out of you,
to the point that you lock yourself in a room with books
read by street light, standing behind a curtain. This is how
madmen and poets are born.
How could you not resent happy people when they are so—how to put it—happy
that your teeth hurt? But do not worry; they are not that much different from you.
They are just a tad better thespians. Of course, you can always try hard to change
something, even if only the scenery, hoping that a new scene will make a new act
possible, and the new act will make you a new, hopefully happier person. Perhaps
all you have to do is move elsewhere. The problem is that it is a little like buying
new clothes. They may be fashionable, but you are still naked underneath.
If you turn to big names like Shakespeare, da Vinci, or, Godwin’s law notwithstanding,
Hitler—the ultimate evil—to define a point of reference from which to move the absolute
blandness underlying our tedious yet convenient inadequacy, there is a risk of throwing
yourself at Newton’s flaming laser sword of a sort. But even if you abandon the trenches
to be content with the contemplation of the Bavarian gentians, your obliging neighbour
will get his hands on you eventually.
We used to celebrate this day, the seventeenth, and then I cursed it passionately
for a long time. Perhaps now it is what it is supposed to be—just another day
that sometimes reminds me of something, although I am not sure what exactly.
But even if I were a function of memory, the body that bears it is no ordinary
blackboard that has lost its only piece of chalk.
For the future me
As a creature of symbol, bored with the steady pace of every day life, he craved
gestures and milestones marking the progress of his tedious little insignificance
full of wishes of small importance and efforts that did not matter in the slightest.
After many a year, he learned how to pretend so well that he convinced himself
that he was about to be happy. Maybe another step or two, an extra drop of sweat,
or one more bitter bite to swallow—but felicity was there, or so he told himself.
The irony is that in his futile attempt at scoring big once, he actually missed all
the trifles that ultimately each day is made of.
hidden pilcrow 