Tag: poem

My analogue youth

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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.

A matter of practice

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I think I’m overthinking this—life, I mean.
After all, how complicated can it be?

You wake up in the morning,
pee,
wash your hands,
prepare breakfast,
eat it,
brush your teeth,
change,
sit in front of the computer for a few hours doing something someone thinks is important enough to pay you for,
have lunch,
read an essay or manhwa,
work some more,
have dinner while watching a coming-of-age comedy drama or isekai anime,
go for a walk,
do some grocery shopping on the way home,
find a suitable time filler for the evening—write a poem, perhaps,
take a shower,
brush your teeth,
jump into your pyjamas,
and go bye-byes.

After a while, you become proficient enough to forget the last time you asked:
Is that all?

Words that fell on deaf ears

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For my parents

It’s twenty twenty-four; I’m forty-nine,
and sometimes I think about my death;
but what I really want is to tell my kids
that at some point life will contradict them,
yet they have to plan and then carry out that plan;
that this will happen again and again,
and that their kids, if they have them,
will not believe them either.

What does it mean to be a poet?

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What is the worth of mere words, if their true meanings make no difference to what a man does?
The Good Book. Parables. 11:7. Made by A. C. Grayling (2016)

Sometimes I wonder if I’m still capable of expressing a genuine, unadulterated awe
like my daughter does. It’s like facing Wendy Beckett—whom I enjoyed watching
wander through the world’s greatest museums and art galleries, but whose attire
always left an unpleasant aftertaste on me—when the hours of my youth are no more,
and so is my conviction, yet I cling to the mores that the social inertia has instilled in me.

Perhaps that’s exactly what it means to be a poet.

Autobiography

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I happened. I happened to them just as my birth happened to me.
Inevitably, neither of us were prepared for the many regrets
that come with the territory. No wonder I was too old to be young
and later tried to compensate with a nuclear family of my own.

I remember books, lots of books, and the librarian looking at me
with suspicious disbelief as I put another stack on the counter,
so I resorted to a trick, signing up for all the libraries in town.
I wish I had been as cunning with the bullies in the neighbourhood.

Then came puberty, with its teenage acne and masturbation on the couch
under a kitschy reproduction of the Black Madonna of Częstochowa.
I even got a taste of adolescent rebellion—for a whole week or so,
until I got home from boarding school and my father saw my Mohawk.

Adulthood turned out to be not as exciting as I thought it would be.
Well, except for a few acronyms I had to learn along the way
—some we all had to know, even if without much commitment,
some I experienced first-hand—MRI being the latest.

The secret life of a casual libertine

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Torn between the four-volume Forcellini and Van Reed’s ‘Waei Shōwa,’
the casual libertine relishes the metre of ‘Pēdīcābō ego vōs et irrumābō’
while not shying away from the formative influence of ‘Urotsukidōji.’
But while he indulges in Roman literotica and the occasional hentai,
there is one guilty pleasure he would never admit—seeking the longest
sentence in ‘Der Tod des Vergil.’

A brand new paradise

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Perhaps it was a fragment of the Berlin Wall embedded in an acrylic block,
gathering dust on a shelf next to the certificate of authenticity,
or the faded silhouette of Gary Cooper on the iconic Solidarity election poster
in a glass case on the wall of the study, or some other memorabilia from the era
that, at a glance, brought to mind the end of history—that sarcastic mistress,
whose abrupt return from what turned out to be nothing but a short vacation,
caused the last man’s every reading to become an exercise in caution.
But the crisis of authority met the advent of the algorithm, giving birth to a bastard
cooking up a brand new paradise based on the good old blueprints—an ant colony,
only this time from a bio-lab test tube, augmented by neural implants.

The wisdom in a yawn

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Sitting by the window, in the last rays of evening light, I read
the words of one man asking another again and again how long
he will delay to be wise.

The question, though asked in the second person singular,
could not possibly have been addressed to me, for I am a poet,
and we all know the ‘Apology.’

So who is that individual our sage is so insistently enquiring?
Would it be the normal London plumber plotting some infernal
hole among the roofs?

Whoever he is, I hope he is not yawning as hard, though of course
one can always blame the weather, for today it’s raining cats and dogs,
and that always puts me to sleep.