La vie serait une comédie bien agréable, si l’on n’y jouait pas un rôle. / Life would make great theater, were it not that one plays a role in it.—Denis Diderot (1713–84)
My own role in it is not to shoot the seagull
Or chop down the orchard, Chekhov said.
I get a thousand roubles for a play is all.
And something tells me that I’ll soon be dead.
I, too, play a subsidiary role—"the poet."
No one gives a tinker's dam(n) for what I think.
I do my best to make the viewers blink,
But there's no future in it, don’t I know't!
November 18, 2024