Poet Mark Ford

I cracked up yesterday at lunch while I was reading a New York Review of Books article about British poet Mark Ford. In it was a poem called “Funny Peculiar” which I present for your enjoyment:

I sit down here drinking hemlock
While terrible things go on
   upstairs.

Sweat creeps like moss outward to
   the palms,
And time itself seems a strange,
   gauze-like medium.

Sleep will leave still newer scars
   each night, or,
Infuriatingly, is a curtain that
   refuses to close.

On the horizon, bizarre
   consolations make themselves
Known—a full fridge, a silent
   telephone.

The television quiet in its corner
Everything and nothing have
   become a circular

Geometrical figure, seamlessly
   joined,
To be wrestled innocently
   this way and that

Into the most peculiar almost
   whimsical shapes.

In the meantime, do enjoy your bizarre consolations!