Category: poetry

My name is Rapunzel. I live in the tower. Nothing fancy,
but no point in complaining. After all, who is to notice
that the cheap wallpaper has long since stopped pretending
to compete with the landscape? And nothing could be more
intimidating than an excess of free time and bottles
of anti-dandruff shampoo in a vanity cabinet.

My name is Rapunzel. I live in the tower. I will wait here
until you finally give up on that ridiculous urge to jerk my hair
or the absurd idea that I need to be saved, whichever comes first.

My name is Rapunzel, the tower you crave.

When I was young, I used to read novels. I read a lot.
And then I stopped. Probably because I wished
for something more, something better, something real.
Or maybe I just got lazy. But I have learned that a rug
is not exactly a carpet, that heroes also sometimes struggle
with continuity, and that keeping your shoes laced up
is never quite good enough. So when a drunk once asked me,
“What can’t you see at the end of that road?”, I said, “A shush
that drowned out the usual voice-over expressed expectations.”

Waking up hurts. A glass of buttermilk and a handful
of vitamins as a breakfast substitute and a momentary
dedication to oral hygiene measure the effort needed
to meet each subsequent morning’s imposed needs
and expectations handwritten on the refrigerator door.
But a telephone that never rings is all for decoration,
as is a box of unread letters and a dictionary purchased
just the day before, which has lost its relevance already,
yet still needs dusting, like all the trinkets of the day.

I didn’t sleep well last night.
Already disheartened, I spent the usual
eight hours in front of the computer.
Then shopping, microwave dinner,
an essay from The Portable Atheist,
and a poem from The City of Dreadful Night.
Meanwhile, I was reminded of the novels
by nineteenth-century Russian writers
that I devoured in my youth. All this kept me
from staring at the newsfeed incessantly.
You see, I don’t know what I am doing.
Not helping, that’s for sure. At best, I calm
my conscience. Because who needs stanzas
when ammunition is low? What can puns
be good for when tanks are approaching?
How much effective protection can all these
sophisticated poetic devices provide
against the constant shelling of skyscrapers
thousands of miles away? Yet I still remember
the words of the poet I learned when I was seven:
“I sound the alarm for the city of Warsaw.”
Another era, another city, another aggressor;
the only constants are the fear and tears
of the innocent.

It takes a comedian to stand firm on a besieged stage
where every day is a deadly rehearsal for a tragedy
written and directed by an amateur historian. It takes
a nation to stand bravely on the street barricades
with Molotov cocktails against tanks and vacuum bombs
thrown by the dictator and his minions. And I suppose
it only takes a glance for a decent person to decide
if they will express sorrow in some dramatic fashion
or actually bother to act upon it for as long as it takes.

Ich weiß nicht mit welchen Waffen sich die Menschen im 3. Weltkrieg bekämpfen,
aber im 4. werden es Keulen sein.

Albert Einstein

And suddenly, it went quiet for a moment
of disbelief. He is playing the cursed card,
only it has long ceased to be just another
game of cards. And it will be on your hands,
Russians, but what will it matter in a place
that is completely deserted?

It would seem that everything was going according to plan.
The weather was good, the protesters came in decent numbers,
there were flags, banners full of angry slogans, candles.
And yet it felt uneasy somehow.

Maybe it was because decent people rarely come out in public,
and if they do, they do so with a certain sense of embarrassment,
unless they are angry enough.

But this time, their cries, compared to the noisy groups of fans
just passing by the square on their way from the stadium to the pubs,
were somewhat stunted and died away quickly.

Or maybe it was due to some feeling of inadequacy. After all, it is just
a small city in the north of Scotland. Or perhaps guilt, as Castlegate
is nothing like Snake Island.

My word processor struggles with the name Kyiv.
For some baffling reason, it suggests that I mean Vicky.
At least it does not mind a psychopath, a thug, terror, war,
or tragedy, because otherwise expressing the present reality
would become quite a challenge. The point is, I can quickly
fix my word processor by adding “Kyiv” to the dictionary.
If only it were that painless to fix the reality that drowns
the sovereignty and freedom inherent in this spelling
in the river of blood.

A bully gets bolder over time,
taking advantage of the passivity of decent people.
So now, as we wring our hands over Kiev,
we can only regret that we shrugged at the sight
of the little green men, and what is more,
we had a great time at the Luzhniki afterwards.
Except that this is not the time for vain regrets,
because Kiev’s fate may cast a shadow over Taipei,
and nobody wants to get caught in the domino rally
of the nuclear-armed strong men.