Almost
written by: Alx z Poewiki
Whistling and sliding, the swift doors closed,
dragged me downward deep into their belly.
I ran to the window, rimed and muddy,
at cage’s ending creaking through night.
There you vanished, vision faltered,
I looked and lingered, lost in drowning.
Soft snow shimmered, slid from the glass,
melted on nostrils, none left to see.
“Sleep now, sink down, spin in the tire!”—
hissed the road-song heard in the rubber.
A stubborn whirling wept into asphalt,
tears of travel turned into hum.
always
when I step in there
into the bus
baire plaire baire
from the pulse of shoes
falls
falls to the floor and I
run after it
snow moves
through the skeleton
and the drive shaft bending
into the axle
all the way to the tires and rims
straight into that something in the hub
like a shell
spinning
creaking
sliming along the city
and ah where to where to
the hummingbird chirps
and the egg spins trembling round and round
and the wind in the rose and the thorns
and the thorn in the eye that chirps
and I
round and round there
where you weren't
there
I don't have
always
That wheel keeps drawing a thread from eyelids and bark,
somewhere deep in the hippocampus — sticky and luminous:
slick, as it passes through the pulse of the hummingbird’s feathers —
plucks them one by one, every day from some hour
later swollen with blood beneath the clean surface
of avian plumage. And I must decide
under my frail little lamp what to do with all this.
Should I carefully sweep the world away?
or let the hummingbird rest in agile motion?
or from the scarred raster of dense grains
beneath the bird’s feathers grow a whole
cold body of a chicken. The sticky and fluid
state of eyelids pierces the night — how I’ve forgotten to be...
And then the dream is torn by a ripped-up chassis:
in the exposed space of the bus’s side
a small child whimpers, in whom a series of feathers
has arranged itself in darkness — by itself, unforced —
and on the lying sheet of metal it forms cold
lines: “it doesn’t matter what the world and memory do to you,
only this gift matters — the one you can give to others.”
Born in 1973 in Reszel, Poland. A resident of a village called Poewiki. From time to time, he appears on various online literary forums. In the “ancient ages” he was associated with the Warsaw poetry club, which operated in Stodoła Students' Club. He is himself fascinated by language—its melody, rhythm, and logic. He debuted with the poetry book “WHO?” (Fundacja Duży Format, 2014), containing riddles about 21 world-famous Polish scholars.
