The Critic

Sad contrarian, each day is a history of reading,
A study of the roots of words.

Whenever I see a spider just have to kill it.
It cannot be allowed to share my space.
Big or small, it has to go.

With each day, each year,
The plucking of nasal hairs
Occupies more and more of my time.
The world, as usual, is in a most unsatisfactory state.

My life’s fugue,
Carousel of themes,
Roundel of out-of-tune voices.
Wherever I turn,
The insufficiency of literature confronts me.
I remain however, hungry for the next text.

According to the Romans,
The Holy Spirit proceeded from both the Father and the Son.
The Byzantines, on the other hand,
Maintained that its only author was the Father.
I, however, cannot sleep,
For thinking about the lost library of Alexandria.

Another book absorbed into me,
The sudden aura of fate and death
Transfixes like a medieval miracle,
A halo round the sun.

A walk in the woods will cure most ills
For a bachelor betrothed to words,
Constantly postponing the marriage.

Virgil the Grammarian,
Mad Irishman from Toulouse,
Describes how the rhetoricians Galbungus and Terrentius
Debated for fourteen days and nights
The supreme question,
The vocative of “ego”.

I, more than anyone,
Would wish to find the key to my symbols,
The symbols of a life.
Or will the whole damn thing
Turn out in the end
To be an allegory instead?

What is the style of my existence,
The hidden authority that selects and informs?

This document counts its half-life,
Biding its time,
With Prester John’s letter,
And the Donation of Constantine.