nearing two months in,
grandfather taking his Alzheimer
pills and other rainbow potions,
almost zombified in the morning,
a high spell mid afternoon,
and then back into dossing...
a stuck memory machine,
a mind on the verge of placebo
when it should be ingested
pure reason...

                     or perhaps the result
of early retirement,
and the aftershocks of
Perestroika in the satellite states
of the Warsaw pact...
                  slower than death he sits
almost nonchalant,
but mostly vague,
        even though he's clinging to
a razor blade and drowning,
each time i ask him to take a morning
walk his stubborn leftovers
are adamant on growing
     a mark from lying in bed for
the majority of the day...

             yet it's still down to 5 minutes
for a crossword puzzle,
   evidently clinging to the minimum
of abstract and fiddly can allow
this, ******* circus of memory...
          even i am a memory censor,
have about 10 memories i am adamant
on keeping...

        the rest can go to hell,
each and every time i recall one of them
I have to allocate it chronology,
mind you: the ten are so far apart
and in a variety of places,
that it doesn't exactly become problematic.
only two days ago, somewhere
there was an Saturday, apparently,
the typical **** fest of drinking
skunking and broken heart sulking,
and all other manner of politics imaginable
under the sun...

   yet i was sitting in a home with
two old people...
       and on the odd occasion having
a trivial argument with one them,
because she knew mira kubasińska
and before going to bed she was infuriated
by an article...
        in the tabloid press:

- like hell, her parents didn't have
musical talents, she slept in hay thrown
on the bare floor, her father sold
wicker chairs and had a hunchback...

the ferocious venom of jealousy,
even in old age, persists...
   a man might as well have said:
stop beating about the *******
and get to the point: the woman's dead...

- grandma, go to bed, you're seeing
a Mongol...

      eyes like Buddha-squints and already
walking in sleep with a distant lullaby...

but today i couldn't let her off,
yes, Edinburgh is the capital of the Scots,
no, it doesn't matter if Abba sang
about Glasgow and touring loneliness
and fatigue in super trouper...

but she early tried to make spaghetti
from my mind when i played her
PRL blues, breakout's
     kiedy byłem małym chłopcem
from the debut:

- did you know that's the young nalepa
    and his father?
- you must have been reading tabloids
as bad as the ones i'm reading,
that's nalepa and his son he had with
mira kubasińska...
- grandma, that's the debut album,
   when breakout was a band as good
as peter green's Fleetwood Mac...
   it's the young nalepa with his father!

I didn't win the argument...
    after a while I changed the subject
cooling the "problem"
        by talking about the weather...

and then there are days spent with
old people where the mortal fact is
unnerving, but not in a way that might
inject ambition into you,
to take chances with some untrodden
secret avenue and spontaneous
reawakening in mid-life...
              a metaphor of early Alzheimer's:
an old man's donkey stubbornness,
the unnerving fact and the joke
of the view from the balcony:
right at a graveyard...

    the unnerving mortal fact,
or rather, if you manage to find an honest
old ****: old people ask the same questions
as children might,
       yet they ask the exhausted
question, rather than the annoying
question...
yet still the persistent
      construction of a sieving process
of teasing knowledge while mingling
it with ignorance...
        
      no man can say he doesn't sieve through
this life in some regard of keeping
it: intact...
                hard to say the exhausted inheritence
of taking certain things for granted,
not having inspiration from a blank,
canvas...
             but there is a sieving process...
like any beautiful woman
seen by the shallows of the eye...
     I beheld: but I didn't reside long enough
to be, an adamant admirer,
a muse exhauster...
                      and gallows keeper of:
seeking responsibility outside the mundane...

it's not an evil ignorance, hardly a forced
denial,
             and nature is to proud for us
to shield ourselves with doubt...
            as seen in an old man...
                       however minute the deterioration
and his attempts to escape by
memor bombardment,
   like some secular confession otherwise
attributed to a priest...
            
      if there is truly any beauty in this world,
man can only fathom it by acting out
a guise of placebo ignorance,
          not some dumb luck of a *******
celestial tourist...
                         yet at the same time not
perpetually awe-stricken
    pulverised by a seeking question...

/ / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / /

( a truly unnecessary post scriptum
concerning the zeitgeist

      we'd all go mad if suddenly pronouns
became transcendental toward
the current gender neutrality vogue,
e.g.
   ? walked up to a mirror,
    ? peered in,
          in a split second, ? realised
that what stood before ? was not
      ?, but at the same time also ?,
in a reflex split second: ? stood entombed
in a siamese union with ? own
reflection, as ?!...
       otherwise ? would certainly
be walking about, hotheaded
and bore-snout-hot-phlegm-oozing
mirror shard's worth of !         )

oh yeah,  because everyone was so
hot off the mark to read
Samuel Beckett's watt...
      **** knows why the national
pride brigade cites the unread Ulysses.