Homage to Kafka
”My son’s so smart: call him a dog
Next thing you know, he’s writing a story about one!”
What office, to lose the name of subscription
We with such props as joiners know abscond,
Myriad mediation. One cannot have
Individuation without planets, beautiful to assertion.
Is there a facet
Skimped on in our Telosseum?
He had by heart the geometry of failure.
A sage once minuted: ”The human
Is the positive to innocence”.
Should your tumbling rankle, reverberate –
But unto what convincing individual,
Crying Zeno, I do not know.
Our interest’s on the terminus;
We didn’t start for scrutiny;
And if he’s been known to struggle,
Let abjection define him.
”Just like a saint,
To admire the correctives!”
To cover one’s tracks, the dead are sprung
Il est aux Indes
All the world’s a stage –
Thanks for the heads-up, but Christmas gifts began appearing in June
long before global warming had started urban species off on love impromptus.
We may be blinkered with blood,
we are not killed by striated propaganda.
Standards? You don’t say.
You wanted things to coalesce for your retreat,
music to document, the way it only does
in series or divorce. Like an evening in a foreign town,
student-starved, hearing nothing of the Bataclan.
Expansive, like a room that jazz has opened.
That was the point: the world was gone
but he was interested
If, say, a forensic expert
If, say, a forensic expert,
reputable chap, you know him by his bow tie,
cross-examines a witness, a witness adamant
about the pilot’s mannerism as he completed
the final phase in some euphemism-making operation,
attacks the persistence of a memory above five years,
he is not asking the court to jettison the notion of remembrance;
just impugning the poignant fragment.
(Law is not the key to our faculties.)
There’s all this uproar and this poem
hasn’t even begun to whisper yet.
My friends are turning Catholic
and I haven’t even begun to snicker yet.
The fever and the mirror-
the farthest reaches of recurrent jest.
The guards are coming
and they know we’ve made our bed.
(The jest is none other than Lear’s:
a pretty reason)
Who are we to be
the only ones to suggest
life is always a bit wacky,
off-kilter in a killer way
Coen van der Wolf (1982) is a Dutch poet writing in English. He has been published by The White Wall Review and Mobius, among others. He is training to become a history teacher.
Aloka 