THREE POEMS

The afternoon is all mine, and this afternoon three poems of
which I have no recollection of having written were published
in a literary journal much admired by everyone who is in it,
so I telephoned Customer Service at The Directory of Who’s What
in Rarely-read Literature and after hanging on the telephone
for 45 minutes got to speak to Nishita:
               I tell her I need to update my entry and she says
I can do it online, to which I reply I detest to mess with my personal
details online, and after some 15 minutes or so of interesting
socio-political debate she surrenders and says she will send me
the necessary form so I can update my entry, and asks
if the address she has for me is correct, if I still live under
the same rock, and I say, Yes indeed I do still live under
the same rock, it’s the only rock I care for, it’s the rock
I am happy to call Home, and it has long been my wont to live
where the heart is if I cannot live where I wish it was.
               While I await the arrival of the form Nishita has given
the Pony Express rider I play some lieder by Gustav Mahler
which as far as I can tell are being sung in German but I do not
understand German although never mind because the sun is shining
and the cat sat on the mat is purring and I have no reason to complain,
or at least none I can call to mind without some fairly prodigious
and probably debilitating mental effort.
               Proud of my ability to multitask I read while the music plays
and while the songs are sung: it’s the story of Perseus and Andromeda
(“I, Perseus, the snake-haired Gorgon’s victor; I, who dared
on soaring wings to ride the winds of heaven . . .”) because there’s
nothing like a little bit of realism to keep one’s feet firmly on
the ground after an episode of publishing success, and it is, after all,
awful bad form to shout about one’s achievements from the rooftops.

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Martin Stannard