When does a tourist become a burgher,
and for a pedantic, yet unassuming gentleman
like myself, would it be an insurmountable transition?
After all, when I walk down Back Wynd,
no one can guess one way or the other,
and two decades in Granite City have instilled in me
a certain taste for grey, whether it be walls
or headstones.
Abandoned in no man’s land
between the living room and the kitchenette,
I read ‘Portrait of a Lady’ aloud
to the mealy-mouthed hum
of the microwave heating fish
and vegetables for my solitary dinner,
only to realise that it no longer mattered much
who I was before breakfast if no one was there
to tell me how to get through the supper.
As a kid, did you ever dream of creating something
unwittingly complicated, like the theory of everything
or a box of matches to light the stake, or practical—
another Antikythera mechanism, for instance—
only to realise years later that no one expected you to
because apparently, nothing beats the nine-to-five
on the way to the golden age? And they may be right,
but you know what? At least you won’t be crying
over pyrite.
In this backwater of ours,
where pragmatists work on dating algorithms
while romantics try to figure out how to get rid of space debris,
obscurity is not a bad thing,
especially when you plan on becoming a master
of the single sentence.
Looking at the old ray diagrams of a telescope
reminded me of the one I once bought
as a birthday present for someone
but missed the opportunity to give to them,
and now it sits under my desk—
like the Kilbrittain Whale—
next to the document shredder, collecting dust
and the occasional pang of guilt,
just like all the languages I’ve ever learnt,
or rather tried to, only to end up skimming a tad of Polish
and later getting a smattering of English—
one being my mother tongue, the other transplanted—
and in the end, settling for memorising full names,
like T.S. Eliot’s and GLS’s, but even that didn’t go too well
with my memory wrinkling along with my physiognomy.
Thank you, Father, for the acoustics lessons
after midnight, when drunken screams carry best,
and for introducing me to the arcana of ballistics
using living room chairs as convenient projectiles,
and for the blunt realisation that a bare fist
could easily punch through a bathroom door,
and for all the belt-enforced ethics classes
correcting my adolescent lapses of judgement.
Only after all that, you never told me
why you brought me here.
I brought home a used copy of T.S. Eliot’s collected works and cried
like Peter Kien on his wedding night—there was something tragic
about the torn and stained dust jacket and the dirty edges, as if Faber
and Faber had printed a hewer’s handbook—only to catch a glimpse
of a snob in the mirror.
They say that people won’t know how you feel
unless you tell them, yet it’s difficult to expect understanding
from those who dream of immortality—
where opulent octogenarians become the new youth,
leaving fingerprints in the linguist’s garden—
while all you’re looking forward to is for someone to tell you
what it means to be a proper grown-up.
Sometimes I return to the books of my youth.
They are the same and yet not quite,
partly because I read them in a different language then,
but also I have long since parted ways
with that whippersnapper.
hidden pilcrow 