Here are my poems in English and Polish.
The end of the world starts small—it could be a handful of dried goji berries
or marginalia left by the previous reader of the ‘Homo Faber’ you just bought
at a stall—yet apocalyptic eschatology focusses on a grand finale of a sort,
even though the whole world comes down to a few stanzas on a tarnished page
trapped in the typewriter perched on a battered desk in your attic studio.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic,
says Clarke’s third law, yet it doesn’t feel particularly magical
when you’re trapped in a narrow tunnel, following pre-recorded instructions
played at you over and over again:
breathe in;
breathe out;
hold your breath;
resume breathing.
Perhaps it’s the emphasis placed on the word ‘sufficiently.’
After all, you are a child of the age of electronic gadgets,
so it takes more than half an hour of creaks and crackles
to make an impression on you. If anything, that bulky cube
with the narrow table sliding into the tunnel at its centre feels dated
compared to the latest smartphone glued to your hand,
and as an educated individual, you have a pretty good idea how it works.
Or maybe it’s a matter of definition, since ‘magic’ is still part of your vocabulary
but reserved for fireworks displays and first-date ambiance.
Whatever the reason, you might need some true magic
to escape the results of this scan.
Whether you talk or muscle your way through life,
eventually you will reach a point where, as someone said,
the candles cost more than the cake, only to realise
that despite the impatient anticipation of the baked goods,
in the end it all came down to the glimmer.
Sometimes good things happen
where you least expect them, like when you mix reheated leftover buckwheat groats
with peanut butter—because that’s all you had in the fridge—and discover
that not only is it edible, but it’s actually delicious; or when you read an essay by Mark Twain
with no particular expectations only to notice with amusement that it’s dated
to the early 1990s; or when you open the curtains and pause for a moment, mesmerised
by the dance of light and shadow on the wall of your study, caused by the sunlight
reflecting off the windows of the ramshackle across the street.
Sometimes good things happen
as the trinkets of the day.
I have always suspected that the model autobiographer
would be a eulogist dwelling upon the preexisting innocence
and the final struggle to maintain its appearance, admitting that,
despite advising others to live with their eyes wide open,
he hardly ever dared to raise his gaze above the shadows
on the pavement, yet never asking forgiveness
for stepping on them.
The varnished teenage deigan masks,
though lacking an artisan’s touch,
fight for the leading role on the main stage
of their little drama—a bus stop—only to become a trophy
in a desperate act of impersonating adults.
Call me a snob, but I simply can’t stand the aesthetic,
or rather the lack thereof. Maybe if it were the return of seventies glam,
but all I see are badly applied thick layers of makeup,
insanely long, tacky eyelashes, and exclamations
steamed in unfamiliar perfumed fumes.
Yet I remember the scent.
And the king ordered that the goatherd and his family be lodged in the chamberlain’s palace, and the chamberlain in the goatherd’s hut; and recommended the moral of this tale to all who heard it.
The Good Book. Parables. 21:20. Made by A. C. Grayling (2016)
There must be something wrong with me to doubt
the words brought under a secular banner.
There must be something wrong with me to see
neither the kind poor nor the selfish rich, but a ruthless monarch
who dictates the fate of his subjects at whim.
There must be something wrong with me to think
that replacing a cleric with a sage solves all my dilemmas.
But when even the Scriptures have allowed themselves one sceptic,
isn’t incredulity our duty?
As a creature of the word, I could imagine the alphabet as something that shapes my world.
And yet, before I learnt my ABCs, I encountered numbers, albeit in a rather selective manner.
It was the church nave where I first heard triple six uttered in a grave voice
by an old man in a peculiar outfit speaking from the ambo. Only much later did I learn
that the trinity he also mentioned means three, although ten turned out to be the real challenge
brought on by the catechism lessons, which also introduced me to the significance of seven.
Of course, this happened after I went to school and learnt numbers in a more structured way.
But neither catechism nor maths classes were as fruitful in this regard as the playground,
where a fist taught me the difference between one and zero.
Sometimes I wonder what my kids would make of my analogue youth:
the crackling demos by garage punk bands making up for their lack of skill with savagery and volume;
rewinding tangled tapes with a pencil;
hunting for R20 batteries so that the boom box wouldn’t die halfway through a party on a park bench;
a festival in Jarocin where strawberry jam was as good on a slice of bread as it was for stiffening a Mohawk,
and every sip of plonk had that familiar aftertaste of sulphur;
not to mention confusing loo attendants with a fictitious Honorary Urine Donor Card
that supposedly entitled the holder to a discount on the use of urinals across the country.
Sometimes I wonder what their memories will be of growing up in the digital age
of mobile zombies and keyboard warriors.
hidden pilcrow 