It is such a decent vice to have,
or at least an interesting one,
like a minor stroke or veisalgia,
and once you’ve got over it,
you don’t even need a physician
or a chemist—just a solicitor
and perhaps a poet.
Tag: wry humor
A dripping machine
As a lowland creature of wrinkles and grey hair,
who reads the—handily predigested—Übermensch preacher
while doing daily workouts on the exercise bike
in the comfort of my spacious living room
rather than jotting down thoughts while hiking the Fex Valley,
I wonder if I have earned the right to complain.
After all, I never asked for this ordeal,
although compared to many, you might say
my life is little more than a hassle. The thing is,
even a drop of water can be unbearable—
ask de Marsiliis.
To have faith
Sometimes you have to have faith in yourself,
even when the mirror screams ‘old and ugly’
and your desire for sex—meaningless or otherwise—
no longer goes beyond the topic of an article in a rag
casually opened while waiting at the hairdresser’s,
or so they say, and there may be some truth to it—
atheists decorate Christmas trees too, after all—
but it’s hard to shake the hand that just castrated you.
And then we are free
As insatiable as it is accidental,
who’d have thought life would be anything
but a mere inconvenience?
After all, when it comes to life, all we have to do
is sustain it until we produce offspring,
and then we are free
to perish.
Birds of a feather
I’ve heard that if you look like a duck
and you quack like a duck,
then you are a duck, even if the rest of the flock
sees you as an odd—let alone a dead—one,
and yet, the eccentrics and the hopeless aside,
few things feel as unwelcoming as the world
of yellow rubber.
A bitter muffin topped with a golden birthday wish
Life is a curse—a sentient one all the more so—yet we cling tenaciously
to this self-perpetuating whim of fate, failing to see that we are nothing
but victims of Stockholm syndrome in a vicious circle of reproduction,
with the upshot of comatose reason as a fig leaf for weaponised intimacy;
nothing that an episode of hentai and a box of tissues wouldn’t have solved.
If only I had known this all those years ago, or better yet, if I had never
been born to have to learn it.
Reflections
I read somewhere that the four-dimensional
topology of the human body is trivial,
and I thought there must be something to it,
because when I look at my feeble carcass
in the mirror after a lukewarm shower,
I can’t shake the feeling that I’m looking
at a misshaped earthworm on a rainy day;
the latter, at least, has first loosened the soil,
not their tongue.
January
Life is a no-win situation,
at least when, wrapped in a blanket, wearing two cardigans, I fight
the cold and my own words.
At first, I didn’t mean the inevitability of death
(mortality is actually a silver lining so few can appreciate),
but our innate, boredom-inducing insatiability—the mother of all vices,
or at least many of them.
But then the Irishman said, ‘Something will be mine wherever I am,’
and it struck me that after all these years and places,
one thing has never left me—my guilt.
Falling for my hamster’s vet
I watched ‘Language Lessons’ last night,
and honestly, if my Spanish teacher had been Natalie Morales,
I would have fallen in love too, but then again,
what if Imogen Poots had followed through on her original plan
and become a veterinary surgeon? If I had gone to her
to get my hamster neutered (not that I have one),
would I have even noticed her, let alone fallen for?
So here’s the question: What are the origins of attraction?
(And for the record, I find Ms. Poots to be a stunning beauty,
but that’s beside the point—or is it?)
hidden pilcrow 