hidden pilcrow

If I stayed overnight, allowing myself to see perfection but phrasing it differently,
how cruel would it be? Or if you waited too long, so neither of us knew which part
still deserved to be considered good enough to play, who should call the wager?
And what were we willing to forgive to enjoy that pity game of ours a little longer?
Perhaps we should always have known better, that nothing would ever tell us for free
where the coarse seams joined.

Ignoring unguided fingers slowly sliding over the burnished neck
of Casals’ violoncello in El cant dels ocells, a sense of decorum,
a relentless companion of pity, renders the unnecessary ceremony
of serving a sovereign inevitable. And only the birds, carried out
in cages from crowded squares for the offence of their singing,
sense the falsity of this servile note.

If the ancients knew the art of statistics,
would they still believe in that little rascal Cupid?
It’s hard not to succumb to the reality of numbers
squeezed out of all those cyberdating ventures.
So, if we trust it, men find most women attractive,
six out of ten for that matter, but not vice versa.
Here, only the lucky two can enjoy the desire.
The rest of us, ugly ducklings, wouldn’t get
a glance, if only for pity. And it makes sense,
I guess, from an evolutionary perspective.
But why all this pretending to be any better
than peafowl?

Why am I still jealous of my old flatmate? We parted long ago.
I moved to town with my dusty desk and overloaded bookshelves.
She stayed in the suburbs, with her windowsills full of flowerpots
and the lawn neglected somewhat. The debris ended up in the attic.

She sometimes calls me, asking to stay with the teens overnight.
Where is she going? I don’t ask any more. She wouldn’t answer
anyway. She never did. Like shared loneliness, sealed with naiveté
and wishful thinking, her answer would only be an act of pity.

My pleasures are plenty, my troubles are two.

A. E. Housman, XVII from Additional Poems

I guess I’m lucky with my undisturbed daddy
long-legs sitting on the ceiling with offspring,
as watching the thirteen little ones, not bigger
than a pinhead, makes me wonder: what do we
do when there is no one to watch?

I measure my week with the flatbreads I make on the first day,
but for some reason, I’m always one piece short. Perhaps it all
boils down to the slightly too small bowl for making the dough,
although coincidentally, I use six eggs in this unorthodox recipe,
because nowadays everything is supposed to have a bit of real
creativity, isn’t it? So I face the breakfast of the seventh day
with no intention of fasting, but also breaking with the weekly
pattern as a last resort. Only, why does anything in between
seem tantamount to Buridan’s ass?

Do I have the right to feel
so much older than I used to?
After all, it hasn’t been that long
since I felt entitled
to define myself as young.
And it’s not about all the scars
I try to wear with honour;
nor about the happy endings,
once set aside for an undefined future
and already marked with the first traces
of mould; nor even that
that juicy-looking red apple
turned out to taste like sauerkraut
(not that I don’t like sauerkraut anyway).
The problem is that I don’t know
who this competition is against:
me from twenty years ago
or twenty years in the future.

I don’t know French, although it sounds beautiful in songs.
I would definitely like to know German as there is so much
to learn in, say, Über Gewissheit. But I know some English
for practical reasons, whatever that was supposed to mean,
and my mother tongue, Polish, got a little rusty over time,
not to mention all the past failures of my own making:
Russian, Latin, Ancient Greek, and Italian. As it turned out,
devoid of willpower, curiosity ends up in wishful thinking.
But I always had the excuse that one language is enough
to say something profound, leaving the wearisome details
of translation to posterity.

I’m a time traveller. It all began when I was seven,
though it didn’t really start until I reached ten or so.
At first, being cautious, I stuck to the not-so-distant
past of my own neighbourhood. As naïve as it was,
it gave me a safe haven to practise my new ability.
But it wasn’t until I joined the two paid mourners
at Père-Lachaise that I realised its full potential.
And ever since, I have travelled back and forth
with no restrictions and no regrets, perhaps.

If only I had realised then what I had missed
in this cemetery of intentionally blank pages.