Scribblers sometimes mistake ink for blood, or maybe the other way around.
When it happens, shattered glass slashes through pages that, all of a sudden,
lack subtle onomatopoeias, even though they were never short of promising
exordia, and twisted words reek of muddy trenches lined with the withering
declension of a bare chest.
We are going to die. Yes, and we will die in a well-covered silence that changes
nothing—see visitors’ beds, which count the strenuous hours of uneventful sleep
with the precision of borrowed time—a performance reluctantly paid in advance
with the unearned obol of a little act of pity that we yet seem to miss somehow,
as if we have always stood too close to one another to see each other’s faces.
I. I am going to die.
Sometimes I think back to my adolescence, with its hopeless battle with acne
and hectic masturbation schedule on a creaky couch beneath a shoddy replica
of the Black Madonna of Czestochowa I was supposed to pray to every night
before going to bed, and with the other boys and our silly dares, like running
naked through a cornfield or guessing who slapped your tightly clenched bum,
although it never really went anywhere. Now that the apple had finally ripened,
reaching for it, even if no longer forbidden, simply proved to be way too much
effort.
I’m not sure what is expected of me, or I don’t remember—assuming someone told me that once,
when I was looking for something tangible, even just a bruised apple—although it hardly matters,
or so they say, as long as I follow the flock. But maybe that’s all it really is: knowing the decorum
of the lea and never touching the electric fence around it.
I envy you, my boy, with your damn good name, a noble one, still oblivious
to the bitter taste of the lecherous garden’s fruit, where the precious moments
behind the curtains provided a temporary substitute for innocence by stealing
the light of street lamps with the words of yet another forbidden storyteller.
And I recall you hoping that one full moon would bring you a dragon fruit.
But for now, you will have to make do with an apple.
In a way, I gave up on my chances. For a time, life was about perfection,
which was tantamount to the good of the great Athenian. And even if not,
there’s always been a perfect body, perfect job, perfect family, with a wife
and kids—you know, all those things to accomplish before the expiration
date is over. But years later, I realised that perfection truly does take time.
After forty-seven years, apart from a mailbox full of advertising messages,
newsletters, and the occasional Viagra spam, I have only become perfectly
forgettable.
Immersed in the words of emphatic announcers, with each new cleft sentence
less inclined to elicit that wicked “who are you?,” did you stop asking questions
because everything became complicated, or did everything become complicated
because you stopped asking questions?
What should you do if you get strong chords stuck in your head and can’t get them out?
Or perhaps they are words, repeated over and over, like an unscheduled interlocution
with yesteryear’s obsessions, except that there is only inexpressible dread on your part.
To a point, attempting to make newfangled origami or reading the elaborate lewdnesses
of an ancient Roman libertine may help. The problem is that, if ignored, a little earworm
can turn into something sanguinary.
Sitting in the armchair by the window, I looked at the fallen
leaves soaked in the rain, beaten by the heels of passers-by
rushing into the unknown as far as the dust they are made of,
and tried hard to make an anecdote out of my ultimate ledger.
And so it came: the white sheets, yesterday gently brushed
by the soul cake crumbs, were now in the wash to be ready
for tomorrow’s catafalque.
hidden pilcrow 