Embedded Files
Europa
Sometimes the self is a date line change
like a suspect idea on Senegalese servers
or a fish dragged out of the air
that’s how the self is sometimes, the self is a hand
never an eye though
someone else is an eye it is always someone else’s
and the self is sometimes something in city gardens and in hyperlinks
on streets and in squares (#in_the_Campo_di_Fiori)
the self is sometimes an ancient Greek who happens not to be Socrates
because there are other things to do, like getting out onto the streets
sometimes the self is the most external form of memory
in fact the perfect memory: a small black flashdrive
whose most straightforward daemon says zero one
it is also sometimes the moment when techno dies
and yet something carries on, as hits, hits, hits
and it’s not even music but a whole continent
sometimes the self is a date line change
like a suspect idea on Senegalese servers
or a fish dragged out of the air
Just like that, O Europe
and it’s this which is choking
on something
This elegy is not about Palestine
One more thing about mirrors: the TV on the wall
knows everything but says nothing for/ to every Palestine
except during the ads there’s a cheap Turkish music video with no sound
And another thing about mirrors: all over Palestine
there are none because there is no Palestine now
(and another thing about mirrors: Palestine is here
in front of a mirrorless wall, reading the music in dance moves
Palestine is here wrapping kebabs in silence
Palestine is here but is always gone by morning)
Elegy for the Department of Game Theory
and Social Mathematics at the University of Warsaw
Spam is the order of things and will kill us all one day
if we don’t build up our defences. Out of cardboard boxes under Hala Banacha
random Vietnamese are selling calculators
(there are random processes as well: when you are a Vietnamese kid
in a trashy Vietnamese t-shirt with an uncle who is a mathematician
or when you are that uncle: sending home money
and emails as neutral as oxygen) and you need to know this on top:
how much you could earn with all these calculators
being a Vietnamese kid (but you don’t know: so be like that kid
and know nothing about numbers yet still sell your calculators
every day at the metro exit casting your leaflets on to the ground
as an offering to the gods of the underworld because who the fuck
would read them in Polish). So the old statistician dreams he’s a thin slice of
oxygen or dreams that he’s his very own model: vast are the rice fields
and sunlit the villages: but nobody knows about this:
and under the ground every single blade of rice is calculating profit and loss
(so just let it be this profit and loss). And on every single atom of oxygen
there are tiny little counters (if you breathe in quickly enough, that is).
stretto
Spam is the order of things and if it doesn’t make us stronger
we will understand it eventually. Out of cardboard boxes under Hala Banacha
they are selling calculators Der Tod ist ein Statistiker
aus Vietnam (and air is held together by one atom of oxygen).
Villanelle for Jacek S.
In June Jacek S. blew himself up in Iraq,
the first Polish suicide bomber
from the ranks of Islamic State.
(Samsung S1 auto-infobar 12.08.2015)
that the world decides the language of our borders
(in Arabic mostly) that on the coastline of the city
(where the camps grow) that there is also noise reduction
that will one day save us (the poem is neither about this
nor about sudden death but a preliminary
focus: that determines the language) Our borders
were not settled by us: Jacek, there are questions
that I will not ask because I know what is coming
is unclear and I would like to believe in noise reduction
(because, Jacek, we decide the language of the answer for ourselves)
This is obviously the temptation: to go inside the self,
and not find oneself, or any edges to the self.
Know what, Jacek, sometimes I just have this sudden need to gather
old memes (which might be because we can only grow anew
from the same old root). Is this where the noise reduction comes in
or is it just a form of sacrifice? You see Jacek this is before
we find out that there are camps and cities
and memes (which will save us if we have noise reduction.)
And now I will tell you all about settling the borders:
# ecological
And we used to play ‘Fallout’ so it wouldn’t befall us as a portent
the hazy air the end of seasides the end of crops
(I’m not going to say here what it’s like to live inside a
Geiger counter: with a glow above your head and strange
digits underfoot)
SysRq (this elegy is about the state of knowledge)
On his twentieth birthday…
The internet has ripened and you can pluck its fruit
by the handful (four bomb attacks yesterday
in a city I haven’t been to) The screen makes my fingers dirty
with its light: I’m watching attacks in a city I haven’t been to
(in dreams I am an empty room with 1000 open doors
and 1000 little lights just like a server) until my fingers
go numb from the light (and I stuff the light in with my hands).
Would it make things easier if I could get inside the images
inside the descriptions? To expose the eye: in the April sunshine once
I was sitting in a park and watching a dying bee
(and my question is for those who want the details
and do not think it a non-event). Hand in hand or solo
I used to go in the mornings or at night to places as uncertain as the eye
in dreams I used to be a camera (which also betrays the eye). I’ve seen the best
minds of my generation in hipster cafes (I left because
there was a bigger world outside). Sometimes under the North Bridge
where a homeless friend froze to death and saving him in a poem
was a simple reflex (frontal lobe hypothalamus:
(I had also lived there). Moreover: I know a hell of a lot of flats
all empty inside and I remember how the neon of M&S
thinks in either Latin or Unicode
(also how to sleep on a round trip in an empty tram:
in dreams sometimes I’m a man dreaming he’s an empty room
with forty thousand empty spaces where the doors used to be).
But coming back: there were these places and I stuffed in light with my hands
(and when I ran out of hands I just didn’t eat) but now I watch bombings
and only think about the place: how once in April there was the death of a bee
(: I see it, then debug it, because I yearn for thee)
I saw there was some law at work but I didn’t know what
(I saw there was some law at work but I didn’t know what)
[Rod Mengham’s most recent book was Midnight in the Kant Hotel: Art in Present Times (Carcanet: 2021). He is currently working with Marta Koronkiewicz and Pawel Kaczmarski on an anthology of avant garde poetry by the younger generation of Polish poets.
Radek Jurzcak, b.1995 in Poland, received the Silesius Wroclaw Poetry Award for his first book External Memory (2016). He was also winner of the 21st Jacek Bierezin National Poetry Award in 2015. Having studied philosophy and mathematics at Warsaw University, he now works as a machine-learning engineer.]
Copyright © 2022 by Rod Mengham, all rights reserved. This text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of copyright law. Archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the notification of the journal and consent of the author.
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