Literal Madness

You know those literal-minded people,

those people who seemingly believe

that words should only have

one, bloody meaning,

 

and that Nuance is a place in France

(No? Well, imagine that you do

know them, okay?)

 

Well, these people who are literally-minded

should never keep a pair of boots

in the boot of their car.

 

Imagine their bewilderment

at having to answer,

when asked the whereabouts

of their boots,

 

My boots are in

my boot.

 

They would not be able to

follow the contradictory madness

inherent

in such an apparently harmless statement.

 

How can my boots

be in

one of 

my boots?

 

they would think, even if momentarily,

before they grudgingly concede/recalled,

that the word boot may –

stupidly, in their opinion –

have another meaning, to wit:

 

‘the storage compartment

in the back of a car’.

 

Your very helpful suggestion,

which is duly noted,

that they simply refer to the boot

of their car –

 

as a trunk –

 

would have worked splendidly

had our literal-minded acquaintance

but owned an elephant

 

in whose trunk he could have stored

two boots,

one up each nostril.

Silences

I wonder what the other poets think of

when they are not looking

out of their poets’ windows,

 

and contemplating the next word,

the next line,

the next stanza,

and the eternal problem

 

faced by each poet,

in each poem:

how to end the blasted thing.

 

Maybe, like me,

they are meditating on

the multiplicity of silences

which life presents to us,

 

and whether or not

they all sound the same.

 

Perhaps it’s a deep silence

which they imagine,

like the silence of the tomb;

or maybe a melancholy silence,

like the one hidden in the word goodbye.

 

It could be, given that they’re poets,

the silences of the unwritten word, the unwritten line,

the unwritten poem.

Or even the silence of those whole poems

which failed to emerge

into this unquiet place.

 

While they are thinking of their many silences,

you fix yourself upon the silence of this page,

with its borders of

wordless, blank, unwritten silence,

 

isolated from the world of noise

outside of this poet’s window.