I don’t like cut flowers. I have always preferred the unexpected sight of a wild one,
sprouting between the flagstones at the edge of the pavement, in an unclean gutter
just beneath the eaves, or in a crack in the façade of a building, as if almost casually
reclaiming its rightful inch of the concrete jungle.
I have never been quite sure of the first sentence,
but what is the worst that could happen—a shrug
or an equally adequate reaction? At least words,
unlike orchids, do not wither. Except who needs
words in a world made by a chimerical florist?
A man’s whole life in a single stanza—what would that be? An arbitrary anecdote
with a half-baked punchline over a pint of lager that dared to turn into a good work
of fiction in the attic of a morgue? Perhaps. But this would imply that it is possible
to live multiple lives as if there were no end at all. An exhausting prospect, indeed.
Fortunately, we have an immeasurable capacity to make every conceivable choice
comfortably trivial. After all, it’s just life, isn’t it?
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.
hidden pilcrow 