Dabozy - Poetry

Tamas Dobozy

HORACE

His parents gave him one of those names there was nothing he could do with. No matter what

fate he engineered for himself the name put a stop to it. Which meant, he figured, that none of

those engineered outcomes could possibly be a fate, not really, not as the ancient Greeks, for

instance, would have understood it. He tried, for many years, to let the name lead him instead. To

let the name determine what became of the two of them. And the name, God bless it, had ideas.

To start with, forget any kind of conventional work, or what in middle class magazines is called

a career. Forget about the possibility of amnesia and starting over somewhere. Forget about the

name coming back into fashion and blowing open all the doors he'd realized were closed, bolted,

welded to the frame, so many years ago when he was a child. Forget about a career as a video

game tester, which was, he felt, in an ideal world his calling. The name would not permit this.

The name wanted to be placed in a dour suit somewhere on a streetcorner in a part of the city

where the sight of its carrier, e.g. the man with the name, would cause more amusement, more

pity, than offense. It wanted a very simple message, even to the point of cliche. It wanted the

concrete, the overcast, the faded fonts of a graffiti no one could read. It wanted the man in that

sandwich board stripped to the bone, to a hope without an object to hope for, to a deliverance

without any place to be delivered to, to a salvation without anything to save. It wanted the man

already perfected, in other words, in what he was. It wanted a state of disrepair to be the only

state to aspire to.