when it came to naming things we were so imaginative, hydrochloric acid et. al., so imaginative we forgot to equip everyone with enough vocabulary stash of savings, and we decided to call that savings black hole dyslexia; and yet when it came to naming people, our imagination sort of got lost, we became unimaginative... a ****** million johns in the cauldron of speaking - and half of them entitled with a surname smith.
first came gabriel unto mary,
then gabriel became a mr. wordsworth
or a mr. wordington,
the sacredness of the name
enshrined in very famous books
lost their prowess, their income
decreased in terms of people thinking
about them, only the spaniards
were daring enough to name
their children jesus en masse -
and so it goes, modern era, people
reduced to be called peaches & maltesers,
or some other schmuck pluck name;
and then you do wonder,
esp. when you come to a divination,
the catholic bureaucracy, the tetragrammaton
shambles, first the prime gospels
numbering four, then your first name, your
second name, your confirmation name,
your surname - but indeed them you
come across some oddly personal detailing through
the lens peering at a single word,
on paper, a poem by *adam zagajewski
(always breezy poetry, like a cool wind
on a rocky beach in Cornwall),
rome, open city, and with citation -
matthew keeps asking himself: was i truly
summoned to become human?
i know, a whimsical idea, the 20th century's
"perfect" splendour of being humanely
attentive to what that actually means -
now a time when even medical students stride to
use poetry for an armchair, and a time when
poets as such, poets pure and simple
are turning into better magicians than the old
and the terminally ill - while the critics ask
aesthetic questions of whether song lyrics are
poetry, and why you can't really sing what's
defined as poetry, not with instruments at least,
the verbiage they say, a mountain of luggage
just sitting there - no wonder then, given lyricism
has turned to:
um, yeah, pop a champagne bottle, um yeah,
all my ******* and ma'h hoes, um, yeah,
watch me fly the emirates business class,
um, yeah, put my hand in a kangaroo pouch,
um yeah - say oh! say slow! um, yeah,
heads up in the hood, um, yeah; etc.
