Category: poetry

I envy you, my boy, with your damn good name, a noble one, still oblivious
to the bitter taste of the lecherous garden’s fruit, where the precious moments
behind the curtains provided a temporary substitute for innocence by stealing
the light of street lamps with the words of yet another forbidden storyteller.
And I recall you hoping that one full moon would bring you a dragon fruit.
But for now, you will have to make do with an apple.

In a way, I gave up on my chances. For a time, life was about perfection,
which was tantamount to the good of the great Athenian. And even if not,
there’s always been a perfect body, perfect job, perfect family, with a wife
and kids—you know, all those things to accomplish before the expiration
date is over. But years later, I realised that perfection truly does take time.
After forty-seven years, apart from a mailbox full of advertising messages,
newsletters, and the occasional Viagra spam, I have only become perfectly
forgettable.

Immersed in the words of emphatic announcers, with each new cleft sentence
less inclined to elicit that wicked “who are you?,” did you stop asking questions
because everything became complicated, or did everything become complicated
because you stopped asking questions?

What should you do if you get strong chords stuck in your head and can’t get them out?
Or perhaps they are words, repeated over and over, like an unscheduled interlocution
with yesteryear’s obsessions, except that there is only inexpressible dread on your part.
To a point, attempting to make newfangled origami or reading the elaborate lewdnesses
of an ancient Roman libertine may help. The problem is that, if ignored, a little earworm
can turn into something sanguinary.

Sitting in the armchair by the window, I looked at the fallen
leaves soaked in the rain, beaten by the heels of passers-by
rushing into the unknown as far as the dust they are made of,
and tried hard to make an anecdote out of my ultimate ledger.
And so it came: the white sheets, yesterday gently brushed
by the soul cake crumbs, were now in the wash to be ready
for tomorrow’s catafalque.

When a foreigner on the street asks you for the whereabouts of the semen centre,
you know that this is not what he meant. But still, as you try your best to conceal
that, admittedly, improper mixture of amusement and astonishment on your face,
you mumble something vague in response and continue on your way. Well, that’s
what I did, at least. It struck me, then, that that very morning I devoted more time
and attention to the information about Mondrian’s unfinished artwork, displayed
upside down for seventy-five years, than to the poor man, I guess, trying to find
the right attitude, or at least directions to the city centre.

When a daily shower becomes synonymous with the lap of luxury, a bath even more so,
living alone, not to mention working remotely, starts to look nothing short of a blessing.
Don’t get me wrong, I take care of my personal hygiene and I believe in its importance,
if only for health reasons. But sometimes I miss my early childhood in the countryside,
where my mother bathed me in a tub once a week and entering the pigsty did not make
my face wince.

Awoken by a heavy rumble on the windowsill, I embraced autumn’s moody morning
with columns on yet another new prime minister, soaring electricity bills, and the war
in Ukraine—the usual, I guess. Then, after this exercise in my meticulously implanted
islander tongue, I took care of my spine—a mere ten minutes of yoga gimmicks seems
to do the job—and made breakfast. I also opened the heavy curtains to let some light in,
but there was no light. It’s the north, after all, a quiet place of little inconvenience.

I wonder what it would be like if my surname were Young, if it would suit me,
especially now, in my late forties, when I feel anything but young. Unfortunately,
none of the twelve shillings’ worth of words occupying my desk brings anything
even remotely close to the answer to such an absurd dilemma of my own making.
And I just can’t quite decide yet whether I have an innate tendency to be absurd
or I’m just really bored.