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ambulance sans-serif;”>My art is mimicry even though I am not a mime. When I focus I hear the tapping of fingers on mute piano keys. In my mind’s eye these are long, pale and thin, and they move up and down, quite rigidly, like limbs of an intricate marionette that I have seen on D?uga street back when I was a child. And so I focus, I do, I listen to the rhythm that they tap and my eyes move along the hand, wrist, arm and as they do I expect to see Frederic’s face.
Instead I see a butterfly. He sits on my nose. At first I am frightened and brush it off, but then we begin to dance to the rhythm of gentle raindrops and tapping fingers. Our dance is both lively and melancholy, and he cuts it short by landing on a flag that is white and red. The raindrops are no longer gentle and wind takes the butterfly so that I am left looking at the flag and the rain drums on it heavily now the way it did on the roof of our tent in Sulenczyno all those years ago.
I call back the butterfly and I call him Frederic. He is my brother and he is now dead, and I wonder what wind brought him here, all those miles away from home and if he struggled not to mimic, and of course he didn’t, his art needed not to involve words, and I know I could never not involve words and I also know that I am stripping myself bare and that when I next look in the mirror I will be unrecognisable to myself. I wonder this and other things as I stroll through Père Lachaise cemetery.
– Amadeusz Kepinski
The Beast
With morality weighed breath I sought to find
a beast, that haunted men. But an idle warrior
was I. The boy, of my struggles old no more,
Now a bumbling Kent, eye’s lost in tales of lore.
My burdens, my wisdom, gone to their bone.
The Mass is on strike, food to the hungry beast.
I heard their voices, the dead men of this land
All defenders of a faith long gone. Still fighting
valiantly to protect a hollow innocence, lost
Leagues ago when god became the devils hands.
I remember now, those chants, that thunder dance,
which woke a man on a fence. As glasses slipped
and truth was found, the beast, familiarly new,
a mirror to all, in fields of thought where Hopes fall.
The Devil did not steer. It presumed the war won
Like so many times before. Yet Kent was no more,
Gone the man, now a boy’s ideal returned to the fore,
the circle had come full, Courage stood his ground
Before a beast of thought. Hollow was it’s core
A false idea of fear that was nothing to a boy.
– MHF
Our Song
I remember February mornings,
waking up to the clip clop
of the rain on my rooftop
as the sun peekabooed behind mountains
and the sky bled into the ocean
I glanced through fog-drenched windows
at still-bare tree branches
whilst listening to your melancholic breathing,
the music to my heart.
Can’t forget the February afternoons
with sweet tea and warm fires,
when outside the rain lay down our metronome
you tried to speak the language of love
mais il n’est pas Français, mon cher*
much to your naive disbelief
darling, words were never necessary.
The nights, too
passed in company
and somehow lacked love in love
we imagined in our broken melodies,
wasted nights in passing discord
for love and without love
tossed and turned with sleepless sighs
listening to the rain’s steady beat
and your heart.
But your harmony was off-key to my song,
whispered words that meant nothing but nothing at all.
Months and months with broken conversation
and February rain dancing at our feet
left me with the ruptured tune of our song on repeat.
– Adiba Jaigirdar
Tired
I am tired
Not the early
Morning tired when
Your eyes feel like
Peeled oranges
It is a deep
Rooted tiredness
That makes my nerves
Brittle as glass
Exhaustion like
The dull thud of
A hammer and
Sleep cannot help
I am swimming
With no land in
Sight with pickled
Limbs and frayed will
Too scared to sink
I am a dead
Weight my body
Is not working
Right I don’t know
Why days and weeks
Accumulate
Draining, draining
Till this splintering
Lethargy is
Normal I feel
Like a puppet
Trying to dance
With broken strings
I am greyscale
Amongst all the
Technicolor
Everything is
Peripheral
Please go easy
On me I am
Tired.
– S.K.
Litmus
Pulsating in a
rock pool,
alien pink
against a
dark background
visible through its
body.
The jellyfish is
translucent
yet
nobody looks
through it.
Tendrils trail
around a
tear in the
bulb:
A smarting railway
stamp from a
no-longer curious
seagull.
The serene and soft
can protect itself
and does.
Trapped in this
ocean suburb
created by a
first quarter
moon
it lazes in
retirement
Leading to a
brick sea-wall
Condemned.
A girl is
wary of its
sting
and late
for a
mediocre film.
– O.C
