Dementia

I am nothing. You are right.
I�m like someone who�s been thrown
into the ocean at night.

Floating all alone, I reach out,
but no one's there. I have
no connection to anything.

The closest thing
I have to a family is you, but you
hold on to the secret.

Meanwhile, your memory
deteriorates day by day.
Along with your memory,

the truth about me is lost.
Without the aid of truth I'm nothing,
and I can never be anything.

You're right about that, too.



Taken from Town of Cats by Haruki Murakami, translated by Jay Rubin. The New Yorker, September 5, 2011 issue. Speech attributions removed. Submitted by Dawn Corrigan.

When Farida Khanum

sings now,

she does not hide the age
in her voice,

instead
she wraps it in paisleys,
and for a moment
holds it in both of her hands,

before
she drowns it in our sky.

When she sings now,
she knows

that at the end of that note
when her voice breaks
like a wishbone,

he will stay.

And one day

"from beating,
my heart will stop,"

and no turn
will ever take me,

no iron will
melt into the streets

and the night
 - between Raspail
and Vaugirard -
will forsake me,

one day,
all memory will
be water

and long walks
would not do the trick,

need will no longer be
a shirt to wear at will,

and then, when I'll need-like-breathing,
no one will be on the fringes

folks will matter

even a passer-by will
inflict

little colours
washing up in the city,
little rivers sinking
into skin,

people, willing,
unwilling,

and I wouldn't know what to do

except to take to my heart
every thing they say,

one day.


(thanks to Jacques Dutronc)

It comes once in a lifetime,

it happens to us all - for me, 

the landlord's son is the one 

who did it, and in a minute he 

changed it all, yesterday I was 

'bhaiyya,' I am 'uncle' now, y'all.

?? ???? ??? - Gwendolyn Brooks

tr. from Gwendolyn Brooks' We Real Cool

'? ?????? ???' ?? ??? ??? ?????? 

?? ???? ???? ??
???? ?????? ??

???? ???? ?? ?????
???? ??

????? ???? ?? ??-???
???? ??

??? ????? ??
???? ?????

Gwendolyn Brooks

 

Now people see me as grown-up;

at university, they ask me questions and
put me into �committees�, my land-lady
asks me to give tuitions to her sons, and
now, when I see those kids, I think of them
as �kids�. Now people see me as grown-up
and they steal half my sky; when they talk,
they have that suspicion or matter-of-factness
reserved for adults, and it eats into me that
I still think of people my own age as always
somehow older. Even my anger is now so
grown-up, it's edge does not wash away
easily as it used to, and regret vinegars
many evenings. But all this is so odd, it is
so insane, �coz in my head I am still 19,
flying for the first time & fumbling with my
seat-belt on the plane, and, in my head, I
still don't know love & there�re yellow stripes
on my sweater, and I don�t know any better.

The Pornography of Everyday Life

Last year,
I woke up
in a hotel room
in Amsterdam.

There was
a woman
in my bed.

I looked
in the mirror
and saw
that my eyebrows
were gray.

I saw
that I was
forty.




Painter Alexander Melamid, quoted in Forty-One False Starts by Janet Malcolm (Granta Books, 2014). Submitted by Howie Good.

A Life's Parallels

Never on this side of the grave again.
Christina Rossetti

Synthetic coconut shies.
Whiskers absurdly long.

Give the show away.
Everything tawdry and shoddy.

Was it always so?
Were they as cheap looking
in one�s youth when one loved it all?

Does one get fastidious as one grows
older and the fair
always was rowdy
and dirty
and unappealing?

As we came away,
all Himself said was:
�Our poor park,
how untidy it is.�




Diary of a Sheffield housewife, August 1942. Diarist 5447 in the Mass Observation Project. Submitted by B.T. Joy.

Wardrobe Mistress

My mother is ninety and likes
To wear a nice dress.
But she is tiny.

Size ten, and only five feet tall, she likes
Colour, nothing too clingy.
And needs a collar.

She would also like some nonslip
Ankle boots that are
Size four and a half.

Please help.

Nobody seems to cater for
Small, slim people of a certain age
Who are not terrifically flexible.

Do not want low necklines.
Do not like black and beige.



Taken from the "Wardrobe Mistress" column in the Sunday Times' Style Magazine, 29 September 2013. Submitted by Kirsten Luckens.