Copyright 2011 by Mateusz Partyka

Published in Canada by Post North Press You are free to copy, distribute and transmit this work, with proper attribution. For non-commercial purposes only. 7819 St. Mary Place Prince George, B.C. V2N 7A5 matt_partyka@hotmail.com

Contents

Atlantis The Vacation Cities City of Light Winter: An Elegy Mother: A Eulogy Licentious Harps Dead Nature Hye! The Cure

For why do men write poems? To rally everything that remains, and not to sanctify nor propound. - Harold Bloom

Atlantis The Vacation Cities

Atlantis - the vacation cities Maui girls feign the minute romance on my bar tab credit card dollar drinks less a real beer still cash twenty dollars to feel liquid what sirens havent been caught by long liners are self sentenced to the island mentality and escape the continental divides into vacation cities but no cure exists in her bed frame the world

__________________________________________ the volcano erupts

City of Light

the sound board laced with ambrosial soot until I inhale and cataracts explode in the milieu of lucid dreams: (the city of light) funeral pyres shower the young in a white blaze while candle rafts chase the current towards the sea these are the forms of color that drove men to exploration to look for Atlantis who pushed their ships through storm and stress wide eyed in the height of northern lights are these the faces of immortality? sheer cliffs? Dantes polycephaly?

who would want to live with themselves in the temporal tte-a-tte of dead wind? : and the return the architect from inside the music is trying to remember how he pined

Winter: An Elegy and it sometimes happened that while listening to the river, they both thought the same thoughts - Herman Hesse, Siddhartha __________________________________________ a synthetic corona appears trans-mutating sunspots and wormholes that fill our eyes like seven pools of blood a cosmic highway opens. taps into you like a river Escher's waterfall

overlays the forest of mills and semis and permeates the blizzard which lives in the breath up here (I see a lack of location, indistinct if I travel a few miles into the snow, this is Prince George also) December skies still defecate when the ides of March return to winter the sorrows of falling snow appear like smiles to me to you we fear with half a heart that drug states like us listen to the dead __________________________________________ maybe it is time to go

Mother: A Eulogy

Przysiegales, ze nigdy nie bedziesz Placzka zalobna. Przysiegales, ze nigdy nie dotkniesz Ran wielkich swego narodu, Aby nie zmienic ich w swietosc, Przekleta swietosc, co sciga Przez dalsze wieki potomnych. You swore that you'd never become A ritual mourner. Swore never to touch The deep wounds of your people, so as not to make them holy, Cursed holiness, which pursues Your descendants for many centuries. - Czesaw Miosz, W Warszawie __________________________________________ I. For My Mother: A eulogy of the skull. Who can remember you? We got lost in the immigrant poverty of the 90s. We lived in tenements and ate potatoes. Television sold pork chops. That decade ruined me. Torn apart from want of meat. I resent it now, when breaking into public. We are pages coming to terms with the book. You are realer here and satisfy my needs.

II. I craved to live without you, without the lack-love of Europe. I forget Poznan. Our decrepit farm The brick buildings and the modern. Children begged on the street, holding icons of the saints. Poland raised me when I was a child, but belongs to you and your sisters now. It won't come to find me. Why hope? It dawns on me that we will never return. I studied English, poverty and passport. Planes fell out of the sky. Its hard to leave after that. I forgot the way you wept, when I surrendered my mouth. You begged to fix me with the western want of machinery. We had no money to rebuild; no matter how hard you industrialized. You fought the gears of Canada with sweat and labour, while I grew to resent you.

I remember the years we lost to the virgin Mary, when I hid from Eastern European accents. God made me ashamed to talk to you. I sinned and vowed silence. Found a language to escape and learned about guilt. Crippled my thoughts, and eventually realized they were honest, the skull of childhood want, but I'm still recovering. With elixirs, Drugs and girls I found to replace you. Your condition, will become my condition. You were real once, when we escaped through West Berlin. III. Memory is a fall. I bought you chrysanthemums once. They died a week later and you can't take them with you. How could I see you between time and loneliness, want and satisfaction, money and reward? I had to sell you to the concrete, to fund my investment, in a book I never managed to publish.

IV. Leave me your body. Time destroys your face into age and poor faith. I fear release, its heavy. In you, I cling to death and eyes, parts of myself. You run from the coffin, watching your wake. We slept earlier. You can't anymore. The morning came and nothing after. You were never the same. I wanted you to speak or weep, so I could realize how similar we were. Woefully, I pleaded: "Don't sleep." V. If I had settled for how you were, you might be here now. Instead... the hospital room comes alive. You peak and plummet, towards a nearby flat plane. The cold green linoleum hides a torso under your sheets. How will I bury you? The weight is too real. My eyes cringe at the slab, afraid to find you looking for your son.

VI. On the steps of a new red brick apartment, some cold immigrant rain, my body asks where you went.

Licentious Harps

licentious harps sing the muse a melody to no avail innumerable ballads clutter Julys passing and in August a thought: the petal carries farther upon a breath ******* to bend a rose is to bleed and trace the droplets unto her heart

but, oh! That species of brutality! is it my infancy? that withers on this stem she throws a child through the window without a home and September tomorrow Yes! By any other name this rose remains grotesque

Dead nature

dead nature where does the canvas sink into the paint or the skin? give it murder and sex hot bullet aftershave framed feces sells better because the struggle is honest no one exists in the painting

Hye!

Hye! on peyote and shopping for used books I met a stuttering Frenchman poor punk peddler who (2c)b-lined for me who wanted a moment for alms and who didn't shower cause Wednesday is the hump he grew dejected when I stripped my empty pockets but regleamed in the light of my pupils because I remembered that he wasn't hungry and broke just trapped in the city

the concrete body of money and masses the blind windows and street car teeth

the stomach of meat too rich for young angels the sinking pit the concentric circles charity exists without predisposition Pierre was searching for the train that ever departs and I handed him a blue pill to color his iris yellow lightning security came but couldn't reach him in time

The Cure

I. after party head lights to the drive home is happening on the left right pick up of the free coke friendship of the suits who plot against me

the guide is loaded in a southern drawl shining for the music at three thirty while a line bears down dont miss the shot cause it will ruin you cant black out or hit the limit without the risk of molestation or needles II. the train becomes man in a blow/snort contortion of the short fuse sinus and an apology to my mother but I needed this head trip on my own twitch against the government who wants my veins for ten years future organ farming procedure

I never meant to decompose but I accelerate away from the cell for a chance to discover how men escape III. The coke caravan is a mutation the instant epiphany of swordless air cuts through the worry and I pity the user because he came home