Writing Tips by Max Sebald

      'The present tense lends itself to comedy.
       The past is foregone and naturally melancholic.'


--The future...?
Is an exercise in absolute omniscience:
a willful, hubristic beating down
of anxiety-generating uncertainty
by a pointed grammatical (syntactic?) tactic:

'Max & Mimi were going to die-- of course.
At some poignant moment
they would know when, but when their paths
crossed Herrn Doktor Fehler's that blustery Berlin
evening, they were not yet privy to the fatal insight...'

(I believe I remember Milan Kundera having
used this kind of omniscience & future tense--
in 'Life is Elsewhere'? Or 'The Book of Laughter & Forgetting'?)

You may laugh, but...I forget.
Just as I have forgotten where my convictions
of a well-lived life were mislaid.
--