A French and an American student
meet on a train to Vienna and fall in love
sounds oddly familiar, like a pitch
for a romcom scribbled on a napkin
in one of Tinseltown’s shabby bars
that somehow turned into an epic trilogy,
and your only regret is that you were
neither the scribbler nor the lover,
but at least you’re holding on to something
real.
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I’m trying to recall when
a caress turned into a doss—
a simple muscle memory feat—
only to dissipate like an ache
after double paracetamol
and the cold shoulder.
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If I so desperately yearn for human connection, where does that constant trepidation come from every time I have to meet an actual living human being? Why do people seem to be so much more captivating in their refined, textual form? Is it because books don’t exhibit annoying habits or have foul breath, or is it all down to my own shortcomings that I try to hide?
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I find green on blue rather disturbing, especially in their radiant, sun-drenched shades, which sounds a good deal sillier now, when I said it out loud. It’s like thinking you’ve married a woman and then, the day after the fair, realising that she’s a mother first and foremost and that she’ll turn you into a walking wallet once you’ve done your marital duty. But that’s evolution for you. Genes don’t give a tinker’s curse about your dreams and aspirations—their one goal is to replicate. If only there were a way to give them the middle finger once and for all.
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Romantic love is the desire for copulation,
embellished with the timid glances of a sonnet,
unless you are a eunuch who settles for lyricism
out of barren necessity.
Is that why I would rather have an empty bed
than empty shelves?
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Dear Strachey, while sharing, at least in spirit, some of the paraphernalia of cultivation—you had Baudelaire; I have T.S. Eliot—if only I had known you then and shared your outlook on marriage to begin with, and if my admiration for your intellectual finesse had passed beyond the tantamount to witnessing polyorchidism under an ultrasound examination, I might not have stepped into that sanctimonious staple just to regret it dearly afterwards. But I met you late in my aimless peregrinations, so everything turned out the way it did, and all that remains is to share one piece of wisdom—don’t trust vows without a prenup.
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[…] the point of disagreement is not that I like his body better than he likes mine, but that he likes my mind less than I like his.
Lytton Strachey, from a letter to Leonard Woolf
I don’t believe in unicorns
and beautiful boys entering the picture mid-spring
to redeem love—
or whatever that spree in meadowland is called—
only to turn yet another string of random labels
that our days need to progress
from one misstep to the next.
Besides, I’m not well-adjusted—I wish I were,
or perhaps not; maybe it’s better the way I am—
unlike all the pre-highbrows walking down Charing Cross Road
on rainy Sundays; I’m still struggling with the difference
between pleasing you and joining your tribe.
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After swallowing, with a light breakfast, a daily dose of pity
pills and ridicule syrup, you spend the whole morning trying to find comfort
in vague declarations fastened with unfamiliar words and sturdy punctuation
that presented a sordid little drama as a fare of martyrdom,
only to realise that once you confessed to hearing, in response, ‘I beg your pardon?’
and still kept your calm, as if your gravely misspelt urges had never been revealed,
there was nothing left but to ask: Do I avoid people because I’m afraid of falling for one
and that that would be one-sided and rather silly, all things considered,
or because irrelephantiasis might prove to be contagious?
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my plan is unlimited
calls and texts only my contacts are empty
for now at least that’s what i said all those years ago
when i bought that mobile
remorse
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hidden pilcrow 