Poem of the Day
Yellow Striped Pajamas
By Shamsher Bahadur Singh
walking silently on his paws, he emerges from the semidarkness and disappears into it.
walking silently on his paws, he emerges from the semidarkness and disappears into it.
Here are the snapshots from Horor Vacui
That’s me jumping off a cliff!
That’s me throwing a lit match in a forest of drought!
and I would lean in close and tell you that John Wick kills women like
he’s read feminist theory
After the family surgeon has severed my hand and wrist from the forearm.
And I have carefully washed the separated hand with the connected hand.
And done its fingernails, and put a drop of perfume at the pulse of the wrist.
Tom washes the minerals first
before putting them on the table.
That way they gleam among the leaves.
I turn to enter, turning from those frozen
Sunfields, when I see the rage of flakes,
Diminished into shaves of gold, and streaming
Knowledge defeats its own end
approaching the state of heaven
when it envisions
Spring: the first morning when that one true block of sweet, laminar, complex scent arrives
from somewhere west and I keep coming to lean on the sill, glorying in the end of the wretched winter.
The scabby-barked sycamores ringing the empty lot across the way are budded—I hadn’t even noticed—
“The summer has gone by both quickly and slowly.
It’s been a kind of eternity, each day spinning
out its endlessness, and yet with every look
The masters are yet dead. Wanting to be human,
I tried to rewrite The Waste Land. The canon’s reach
casts ruinous light. The masters’ pens breach
I will not grace you with a name...Even “you”, however modest the convention: not here.
No need here for that much presence. Let “you” be “she”, and let the choice, incidentally,
be dictated not by bitterness or fear—a discretion, simply, the most inoffensive decorum.