Art thou poor, yet has thou golden slumbers?
Thomas Dekker, The Happy Heart
the adage says, money does not make you happy,
to which someone added, but it allows you to be
comfortably unhappy. and in this sarcastic remark,
as in the adage itself, there is a painful truth hidden.
they are both chasing the undefined.
the best of the Greeks would rather die in freedom than live in servitude; and the Persians should have taken warning from this.
A. C. Grayling, The Good Book
what does it mean to be a free man?
what does it take? would i dare to ask
the lycians who set fire to the citadel
with their wives and children inside
and ten launched a suicide attack
on harpagus and his army?
and would i rather be one of them
or be among the eighty families
then absent from the city who later
returned to revive xanthos?
and if i keep asking these questions,
will i never have to answer them?
we dream of being stars, but the only thing
we manage to achieve is being a piece of rock,
and not even the big one that shines with reflected
light in the night sky, but the ordinary pebble
polished by the waves of the sea or the stream
of a river. and while playing with one in my hand,
i admire the delicate line of its oval and its fanciful
patterns, the thought flashes through my mind that
the sun would hurt my eyes.
If the man who tells you that he writes, paints, sculptures, or sings for his own amusement, gives his work to the public, he lies;
Miguel de Unamuno, The Tragic Sense of Life
listening to the silence of the wise man
in the agora trying to convince me that
i write to leave behind a shadow of my
spirit, something that may survive me,
i rather trust the old sage from samos.
and so i write for that ounce of glory
that may amuse me a little in the days
i have left without the comforting
warmth of someone else’s arms.
there is this commentator i love to read
and always think about her as beautiful
and smart, and then regret that she is a lesbian
(there is nothing wrong with being one,
it just means there is no way she would ever
fall in love with me if we met by chance).
what bothers me is that i prize her body
before her mind.
It is the strong-builded houses of the dead that have withstood the ages, not the houses of the living;
Miguel de Unamuno, The Tragic Sense of Life
going out for a walk along the promenade in the evenings,
sitting on a bench in the deep shade and exchanging
indifferent glances with the shoelaces passing me by,
i live out of a desperate sense of duty, trying to escape
the old spaniard’s adage.
i am the burning of a chafed ankle.
i am the swelling from an infected tooth.
i am the gurgling in a sore stomach.
i am the sour smell of a sweaty body.
i am the bite of a slice of stale bread.
i am the sip of chlorinated tap water.
i am the brush of the nape of a neck.
i am the thrill of flesh and blood.
i am the am in the uncertainty
of being.
do i still have a chance for an indecent
line of catullus whispered in my ear
in a crowded lift? will i ever find a garter
secretly tucked into my pocket when i leave
for work? is there a hand that i could hold
while walking along the promenade?
these may not be the millennium problems,
but for me they are equally, if not more
important. and likewise, with no answer
in sight.
sometimes i like an essay about a new book
more than the book itself, and i find myself
settling for the former more and more often.
i used to like to walk between the bookshelves
and grab some at random. now, i play it safe,
so i have decided to limit myself to books
that use words like wherefore and asunder,
and the singular forms of second-person
personal pronouns that differ from the plural.
after all, the answer is only as important
as the right question.
hidden pilcrow 