Tuesday, 30 September 2025

If I love you

 
If I love you, what business is it of yours
if I love you, it is no business of anyone’s
including mine own

You cannot exact any requirement
nor any demand from my love
I do not even know myself how I do
but I do, maybe even against my will
or against any form of logic

And should you suffer from it
rest assured that I do, too

And if I love passionately, irrationally
if I love you my antithesis
you shall feel whatsoever you may
it is no business of anyone’s
and certainly not mine

And if I love with the commitment
of one circumnavigating the cosmos
if I love with the desperation
of one parched and starved and ill
let it be just that: love for love’s sake
nobody shall any say in the matter

And if in the great madness of things
you happen to love me
not in return but for love’s sake
perhaps we might mind
our own business together
and be content and serene
basking in each other

like a cat in the sun, eyes half-aclose

floating specks in a sunbeam

stardust whose movement started
before anything or anyone was
 

Monday, 8 September 2025

What Really Irritates Me In Men, Women and Poodles, and Other Sartorial Considerations Very Late at Night, Part 10

 

Disclaimer – this was written in the aftermath of the pandemic, a month or so after the restrictions, and rediscovered today as I wanted to revive the series. I thought I had published it but apparently failed to do so, until today. Be ready to be teleported back...and perhaps get a new perspective on current events.



Dear grumblers and ranters,


I know the episodes have been erratically posted, subject as they were to the whims of my hatred, yet I thought that I should celebrate this tenth edition with a special number. I mean, it's not like I will run out of material anytime soon, right? So I'll approach today's rant from a slightly different angle.


Why yes, of course, this global pandemic has offered us facepalms galore, and in my opinion has accentuated the gap between facepalmers on both sides of the spectrum. Like this one douchebag on Reddit saying that AIDS didn't exist, that nobody had ever died from it, and that it was a giant hoax from the radical leftists to demean and destroy Christianity (as if this religion needed any outside help to shoot itself in the foot). And another bag of cheetos to comment that duh AIDS did exist (called the other guy a moron) but that it was a specifically homosexual disease because you could only get it from performing anal sex and doing drugs. For the sake of humanity I wish I had made this up, but not only do we see that us educators have failed worldwide – thereby implying that perhaps it’s not education that failed directly, but that moronism is too strong an antagonist – we also probably (#sarcasm) can't let people “educate” themselves via social media. Reading this alone is enough to make you contract a glaucoma, and if it doesn't, it brings you one step closer to drinking this world away. But this is not how I want to spill my bile.


I will not touch on subjects such as the US elections and its aftermath, nor will I raise issues such as the French government's response to the Covid situation. I mean, I could put it into perspective with the battle raging between the heathen people who say “LE Covid” and the heretics who say “LA Covid”, or with the astounding number of anti-vaxxers because science is wrong, but I won't. 


Instead, I will focus on more mundane, yet certainly more irritating things (because they affect us in our day-to-day life) which we have been spared because of the pandemic.


It's a world-renowned, Murphian tendency that people with halitosis must want to talk closer to you the further you move away from them. My hunch is that it might be caused by an anaesthetised nose. But thanks to masks, we no longer have to smell halitosis...and instead the perpetrators do indeed have to subject themselves to it. Now, could this be an explanation why some people wear their mask right under their nose? You could legitimately approach this differently, and ask why these people do not have better buccal hygiene, or eat a chewing-gum, or treat whatever affliction causes said halitosis. Yes, you could ask this.


The school in which I currently teach has seen some parents who refuse to wear masks when picking up their obnoxious brats (who only wear masks because they wouldn't be allowed in school otherwise). What has happened, you ask? Have the authorities stepped in to educate them on the science behind mask-wearing? Indeed not. Instead, these sombre idiots have contracted the virus which they claimed didn't exist, and along with their harebrained progeny were forced to quarantine. O, the joy of not having to see these cretinous crowds for ten days. And yes, I couldn't care less about the health of these people. They don't care about yours, why should the reverse not be true too?


Have you ever heard that some people are not sick until their doctor has told them that they are? Think reversed malade imaginaire, think hyperchondriac. Admittedly, we’re just one doctor away from this becoming the norm, and the madding crowds out there might grow to sufficient numbers that we might spot them in the wild. For the moment our GPs hold the fort and tell them for the umpteenth time that no they don't have the Covid-19 because a black guy looked at them, that no they don't have the flu either because they feel their toes are fusing, that no their backache isn't due to the local G5 tower emissions or their Wi-Fi. They probably should turn to a seamstress who can turn Faraday fabric into hats, I heard it’s the new black.


I don't think there ever was a starker reminder than what Rita Mae Brown wrote in Venus Envy, back in ‘93: “Normal is the average of deviance.” In hindsight, we may discover that the loons with phones trying to prove Earth is flat and ending up proving that it is – I’d advise to sit down because it’s chyron-worthy news – that it is fecking round. It sadly is not a sign that some then-silent minority now has access to global channels so they can now be heard. We’re discovering that though of course some tinfoiled clowns do centralise the full package of conspiracy theories, many hold some form of pet conspiracy theory, and when I write ‘many’, I should write “for their name is legion”. We’re vastly outnumbered, and their number is growing by the day, one pandemic, one earthquake or one storm at a time (bleach your eyes looking up the HAARP conspiracy).


In hindsight, some of us will have loved this part of our social history when we had a global excuse for not having to go out and behold the best of humanity. Yet even if one can remain outside of the social media echo chamber, one cannot be immune to it entirely, and the juiciest bits trickle down to us through channels imperceptible. Humanity always finds a way to make you feel it, something to remember it by. Gotta love it. or leave it, but since it’s a tad drastic a move, perhaps it’s better to suffer in silence, or rant on a blog that’s never going to be read. Akin to whether or not a falling tree makes any sound if nobody is there to listen, does the rant not count as silence if nobody reads it?


But before leaving you, hypothetical quibblers and reprovers, full of fresh vitriol and a renewed hatred for mankind (myself included), I’d like to share something I found out about poodles which isn’t as excoriating as you’d hope. I was researching the evolution of skull morphology consecutive to selective breeding (don’t ask me, it was 4am and I couldn’t sleep). I found this article which is super interesting, but then I fell into yet another rabbit hole and discovered that poodles no longer are in the top 20 worst, and top 10 dumbest, dog breeds of all time. Quite the feat, really. Perhaps people realised that poodles are like us in the sense that they put on pandemic pounds, and were the most affected by the lack of exercise and socialisation (still surprised the term “poodlepression” hasn’t come up yet for poodle depression). Not that it made me entirely sympathetic towards poodles, but I no longer see them as opportunistic pleasers, as perhaps we also engineered, or shaped rather, their bleak outlook on life. If dogs could speak.

Thursday, 4 September 2025

on the wind


// on the wind // I heard your name // on the grass // a long time ago // had to be a thousand years, at least // in the night // the thought-memory of you // like a seed // like a tree // in the soil under the fingernails // your name was there too // for such a long time // the sky too overcast to notice // cacophonies of feelings and yellings // no longer drowned therein // only whispers // this unsilence for such a long time // though not the right time // the hawk ascending on the wind // on man-made moonlit mythical wings // finding time slowing down in the shade // wanting to be near // holding hands // with all those years of gestures, silences, thoughts, questions and learnings // gowpens of tragedies, love, carry-ons and acquired smiles // that was the right time // on the cairn I made on the knoll // meant the wait had been the rainbow // how I learnt to make everything I do and say // a long time ago you had been there and stayed // carefully telling everything your name to be remembered // and found // to never end // on the tip of the ear and tongue always // there // gut-feeling me through the ground // never quite lost // like a bonding of molecules with no definite centre // here but also there // now but also then // the most negligible of forces // like the faintest of rustles // on the wind //

Monday, 1 September 2025

Homemory

 

I’ll mark you in my book of memories

between sunfires at dawn and dusk

and meteor waves jolting the spheres


the memory of you will be a home to me

as the sunshafts after the rain are home to me

as the goosebumps from music are home to me

as feeling the last page of a book is home to me


you will be a home to me

in my book of memories

though the shades have darkened 

and the pages will have faded

as the storm of the century raged


home to me, home to me

If I love you

  If I love you, what business is it of yours if I love you, it is no business of anyone’s including mine own You cannot exact any requireme...