PAGE F THE MONTH

July 2009

The terror of error
The error of terror
The terror of seeing
The error of being

 

 

TWO POEMS BY PABLO OMAR

1. MOVING AND SHAKING

Sweetie, sit here and listen up.
Any number of awful things could
happen to anyone of us.

What I usually do is choose just
one.
Play it out in my head for days
like episodes of a TV series which only
I see.

I write the script.
When it comes to worry, baby,
I'm ambitious.
All I need is a symptom of some
sort and the rest writes itself;
tests, results, tears, hugs...

All I need is a symptom of some
sort,
an hour unaccounted-for or
misinterpreted words.
Then the ideas start to flow.

I'm ambitious.
I've got the prime-time shows.
There I'll be, not visibly
Trembling, but inside shaking
from side to fearful side.

I'll be captivated by it.
Consumed.
I'll have no choice but to keep
tuning in.

Any number of awful things
could happen to anyone of us.
And there are many doing
something similar.
Playing out their worries
and fears in their heads.

Knowledge of it doesn't help.
But I wonder, do they put as
much effort into it as I do ?

Like I said, I'm ambitious,
I'm going for the big money.

 

more

 

2. BREADCRUMBS ON THE STUMP
OF A TREE

When the call came
I was in the park
looking at the pond.
The ducks had gone
to some other part
so it was just water
with yellowed leaves.
There were breadcrumbs
on the stump of a tree.
It had been days since
I'd spoken to anyone.
Longer still
since I’d spoken to him.

I'd get up around noon.
Drink a couple
of glasses of white wine
then head to the park.
I'd walk a bit,
but for the most part I’d
just sit by the pond.
Sometimes
the ducks were there.
Other times they weren't.

I'd write poems.
I was trying to make sense
of what was happening to him
and had happened to her.
All the while something
similar
was happening to me.
I've still got them.
When they took me
they kept reading them
over and over taking notes.
Irrespective of all that's
come to pass
the poems are good.

When the call came I was
by the pond.
On the rail, between the
bench and the water,
someone had incised
What is a life if full of care ?
We have no time to stop and
stare.
I was looking through
the gap in the rail,
into the pond,
trying to make sense of it all.

 

 

TWO POEMS BY CHRISTIAN MORGENSTERN
1871-1914

translated from the German by Anthony Weir

MY MEMORIAL

Set up a monument for me
of sugar, deep down in the sea.

It will dissolve and thereby make
a vanishing sweet-water lake.

Then fish in hundreds after hundred
will suck, and be perked up - and scundered;

and they in Petersburg will then
(and Hamburg) be consumed by men.

My name and fame would be revitalled
and by sugar thus recycled.

A monument of wood would rot;
a stone one would just be a spot

for a worthy or a bird
to deposit scorn or turd.

 

ON THE PLANET OF HOUSEFLIES

On the planet of brilliant houseflies
a human's life is grim,
for what he does here to houseflies
the flies do there unto him

On arsenic-honey paper
some humans there get firmly stuck,
while others cut macabre capers
by breathing in poisonous muck.

But one little practice of humans
the flies will not undertake:
they will not bake us in muffins
nor swallow us by mistake.

 

PROTEST SONG

by

Anthony Weir

Hey X (Hey Y, Hey Z...) - Damn you!
You're like something I'd scrape from the sole of my shoe.
You...and your dribbly, knobbly dick...
your idea of 'sex' makes me laugh...and then sick.
You're just another failed masturbator.
You soon fell asleep. I took out my vibrator.

 

 

...AND A HAIKU

Full moon in May is
still a stained and empty plate
above the starving.

 

page for French-speakers

 

In Memoriam Kurt Schwitters

 

Life is too short

to worry about
life being short.

 

 

Senryu by David Giacalone

just one glass of wine:
Google keeps asking
“Did you mean -----?”

 

 

JULY'S MAXIM

 

The world is getting to be such a dangerous place,
a man is lucky to get out of it alive.
- W.C. Fields

 

SOME PREVIOUS MAXIMS:

 

Consistency is the curse of understanding.

 

To want friendship is a great fault.
Friendship ought to be a gratuitous joy,
like the joys afforded by art or life.
- Simone Weil

 

The only god I'd ever think of worshipping would be Neanderthal.
He'd also be my gentle pal.

 

Opprobrium is more trustworthy than praise.

 

To get power over a living creature is to defile.
To possess is to defile.
- Simone Weil

 

The quickest of us walk about
with well-wadded stupidity.
- George Eliot

 

more recent Maxims and Aphorisms can be read on the
weBlog

 

 

click for selections from
PREVIOUS PAGES OF THE MONTH >>

 

 

making coffee

poetic work in progress >