Merdrigaux

I'd likely think of myself as Black if I were brown.

A century ago Morgan Forster chose “pinko-grey.”

Who'd want to be as pale as Hitler's frown!

(I’m on the “pinko-beige-ish” side myself, I’d say.)

It matters little now in any case.

Since human body shades will soon be far from classic—

We're surely scheduled for an erstwhile place

And might as well have raced in the Jurassic!

What motivates one to write a merdrigal

Is much inspiring in the realm of verse:

The need to do something, lest the worst befall—

The poet playing dummy in a hearse.

• Morgan Forster= E. M. Forster, a character in whose novel A Passage to India (1924) says, "the so-called white races are really pinko-grey."

• Charles Darwin called the sudden appearance of the Angiospermae, or flowering plants, a hundred million years ago in the Jurassic era “an abominable mystery” (https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-55769269).

• « Le mot Merdrigal [ . . . ] vient de ce cher vieux Léon-Paul Fargue, piéton de Paris, bourlingueur du zinc, impeccable lettré et solide buveur. C'était un promeneur d'une époque révolue. [ . . . ] Ecrivez des merdrigaux! C'est rude, c'est rigolo et, finalement, ça ne fait pas de mal à qui que ce soit, si l'on ne nomme pas!!! »—http://orlandoderudder.canalblog.com/archives/2006/03/03/1459256.html

The Pier Glass

Se penche pour capter son image sérénissime dans une glace à trumeau. / He leans over to check out his Most Serene image in a pier glass.—San-Antonio, Napoléon Pommier

The mirror’s between two windows

in that phantom waterfront Dreyer

house in Lübeck, An der Trave,

lost in a forced sale long, long ago.

Outside, the scene I'd say's not

credible—I never knew the place

though, still unsummoned into being then,

I came along later, in distant Africa.

In the right window, a wine-dark sea

—most likely red jerepigo—

laps up in Kalk Bay Harbour en face.

On the other side, a kitsch

view of koppies and the Great Karoo,

unknown to my canny Schönenfahrer ancestors, who drawn by trade to the Baltic shore became entangled here.

She could be me, that great lady,

though German in a silly way;

she surely knew her daemon, as I do,

but doubted it. I doubt today.

Her image shivers, windows vanish,

nothing's left; a wanness waits.

It always happens! Best banish

such passing inconsequential states

at least until the glass reflects on this:

that time to be, which we might—if not—miss.

The Trave river in Lübeck

Notes: Koppies, "little heads," are small hills in South Africa. Jerepigo is a sweet, fortified Cape wine high in alcohol. The Hanseatic Schönenfahrer guild traded with Skåne in southern Sweden. A daemon is a software program or process that runs in the background; Heraclitus says that character is one's daemon, or fate (frag. 119 D-K).

Gleet

Mid-14c., “slime, greasy filth,” from Old French glete “clay, loam; slime, mud, filth” (12c., Modern French glette), from Latin glitem (nominative glis) “sticky, glutinous ground,” back-formation from glittus “sticky.”— https://www.etymonline.com/word/gleet

Fowl have a multipurpose orifice

that’s called “the vent”

with which they copulate, void, lay eggs,

and do whatever else the question begs.

Crazed demagogues are similarly trumped

(it's euphemized by neuropathy as "brain");

one might observe, the outcome is the same.

Chicken farmers, dreading what's called "gleet,"

say: “It ain't pretty—and it don’t smell sweet.”

Political scientists employ no other matching name,

noting the weird pursing of the avid mouth

when sticking it to voters without shame.

Much like the orifice that's chicken south!