over the last some weeks it seems to have made complete sense to acknowledge that i've gotten bored with a million things. good fun. i have not a care in the world anymore. the sludge has dried and cracked and when it remembers, withers away. every flicker of a sticky situation sniggers at its own fleeting mirage. its heady. well, almost.

joy.
and here is a current hot favourite:
Too Many Names

From: ‘Estravagario’

Neruda

Monday entangles itself with Tuesday

and the week with the year:

time cannot be severed

with your weary shears,

and all the names of the day

the water of night clears.



No man can call himself Peter,

no woman Rose or Mary,

we are all sand or dust,

we are all rain in the rain.

They have told me of Venezuelas,

Paraguays and Chiles,

I don’t know what they’re talking about:

I know the skin of the Earth

and I know that it has no name.



When I lived among roots

they delighted me more than flowers,

and when I talked to a stone

it echoed like a bell.



It is so slow the spring

that lasts the winter long:

time has lost his shoes:

one year’s four centuries.



When I go to sleep each night

what am I called, not called?

And when I wake up, who am I

if it wasn’t ‘I’ who was sleeping?



This is to say that as soon as we

are thrust out into life,

that we come newly born,

that our mouths are not filled

with all these dubious names,

with all these mournful labels,

with all these meaningless letters,

with all this ‘yours’ and ‘mine’,

with all this signing of papers.



I think to confound things

mingling them, hatching them new,

seeing through them, stripping them naked,

until the light of the earth

has the unity of the ocean,

a generous integrity,

a crackle of starched perfume.