Michael Swan works in English language teaching and applied linguistics. He has been writing poetry for many years, driven no doubt by an unconscious need to prove that grammarians have souls. His poems have been published widely in magazines, and have won a number of prizes. He clings to the belief that it is possible to write good poetry that is neither difficult nor boring, and he often finds humour a useful tool in dealing with a seriously confusing universe.
His first collection, When They Come For You, was published by Frogmore Press in 2003 and was very well received. Michael also enjoys translating poetry, and won the Times Stephen Spender competition for a version of Rilke’s Orpheus, Eurydike, Hermes in 2005.

Quelle: poetry p f

We Tried to Tell You

In a shabby pub
down a back street
late one evening
I found my old maths master
sitting at a corner table
crying.

Not a pretty sight,
an old maths teacher
weeping into his beer.

‘Let me tell you this,’
he said.
‘It does not add up.
It does not fucking add up.

Two plus two
is a random number.

The angles of a triangle
make 37 degrees,
or 460, or minus 11,
or nothing you can determine.
Circles bulge.
Squares don’t have enough corners.
Parallel lines
all meet
or do not exist
or go where they bloody feel like.
The x axis
does not come on the same page
as the y axis.

There is no geometry
that fits our space.

You get on the number 4 bus for the station
and when you arrive
it is flight 968 to Istanbul
diverted to Manchester
and you have to walk back.

Time leaks out of the clock
and scampers off sideways.

One woman
is three women
or no woman,
not necessarily
in that order.

You bastards knew all that
didn’t you?
You knew it all along,’
he said,
knocking over his beer.

‘We tried to tell you,’
I said.
‘We tried to tell you.’

Michael Swan
in collection When They Come For You, 2003
The Frogmore Press, ISBN 0 9531383 6 4