This article is based on this Dutch article by Martijn Benders.
Poets are, in reality, generally terribly lazy people. Not because they don’t try diligently to ‘prove’ their superiority on paper (as if anyone would care), but because you can find thousands of types of beautiful mushrooms that no poet has ever wished to write a poem about in the entire history of humanity.
The same goes for the cuticle. Billions of poems about roses or coffins, but about the cuticle? Not a chance. If it were up to our poets, the cuticle simply wouldn’t exist, even though everyone has to deal with it.
My poem about the cuticle immediately contains a solid piece of language criticism. It concerns the word ‘hangnail,’ which would be a modernization of the much more beautiful Old English Angnægl:
Just like with a tree, as language ages, it starts producing younger and sillier rings. This movement has accelerated: it was ultimately an angry marriage, the marriage between modernization and language. The language is becoming balder and uglier, the first figures are already emerging who simply don’t find ‘the non-existent’ beautiful. Not beautiful at all!
No, not even when it comes to hours. It’s about the beauty! Things that deviate are usually not beautiful! You get stuck on them, without it being clear why you had to stay stuck there, just like that hangnail!
Alright, alright, I dive even deeper into the rabbit hole of the lawsuit I started. The lawsuit is on October 22, and until then I cannot reveal anything about my angles here. What I can say is that I had the Consumer and Market Authority on the line yesterday and they may also start an investigation, more on that later.
Oh yes, it’s said that I can write a poem about anything, as if I possess some kind of superpower. So, the first cuticle poem ever had to come from my hand.
The rest continue to write about the climate and capitalism, because that’s apparently what the financiers like to see.
Martijn 18-09-2024