Kuba Mokrosinski


Masters Of Ruin

Throwing a stone can bring down many useful things.
A pale light, for instance. It may also
incite: a silence, if a caretaker does not quit
his dull habitual croaking. just try cannoning
a volley into some feline eyes: you can
disperse mystery with a single stone's throw.
You can run into the street with a whizz,
if you have lived off an illusion
of her beauty for too long now. With a swing
of your arm the sticky allure falls into
the briny gutter as if sheared by a scythe.
You can adorn your own end with a stone
and just like a stone hit the bottom;
and reclaim your hands.


The Rent
homage to baudelaire

The landlady, a desiccated woman like a mastiff
beaten a moment ago - or a vixen, for she's red -
so, OK, a just-beaten vixen, she drops in on the
first Monday of the month. Knocks on the door, but
nobody can hear it: Mushroom's watching a web-
movie, Obrycki's washing his paintbrush in the
bathroom, she's banging on the goddamn door.
It's always noisy at Greg's room, the room that's
closest. Turn it down a bit, OK, says Obrycki and
Mushroom - a hell of a trumpeter - turns it up a bit,
by mistake. I'm at my Chinese philosophy classes
at the same time. In the end nobody opened the
door for her. She went away. Thursday she comes
again. Says to me, well, you weren't here on Monday,
were you, and I says, well, I was not. And what about
the money, can you pay me today? OK, sure, I says,
and I pay her; I visited my bank on Tuesday.


The Last Hunt

Slippers on, his rifle wriggles
out of his winter coat. 7 am, and he's ready now
to launch an attack. His stalker's hat is worn
only to deceive: no point in waiting
for the slightest spin. An old man's
irony despoils the floor
in an absurd play of reflections - a new arctic
is shrieking, a hunter with a cleaning powder,
that's absurd! Yet still he crawls
though his impetus is gone; the silence, too.
From windward the victim's taken,
she's so thin, kin and can scarcely breathe in the
mockery of her dream. Then a limping, a noise, amo,
amare rocks through the mind. The rifle's full of saliva.


Anti-Frame

there's nothing further to be lost in the eye's gaze -
nothing it can't follow: it polishes the screen
which itself becomes transparent and that' s what
the mode seems bearable for. the background is
determined by contrast, inch by inch the kinetics of
vision gauges a farewell to an image that would slip,
for no clear reason, into any shape.
the mode, that is, the right to disappear,
superimposed unanimously. i watch
dying: i am immortal just now.
what remains is a tool kit, an opposition party,
a centre scattered among all places, flat
as a purposeless line. not worth the impossible visit.
deftly stuffed zeros. kaleidoscope, drawings.
Note: the title signifies a transparent glass frame that
exactly matches its content and therefore can scarcely
be said to “frame” in the usual sense of the word.


Hiroshima

I drew myself a map of fear. a couple of straights. an
intersection. a turned off light. a butterfly crawling on all
fours. a talking stone. or: someone has smoked all the
fags. christ is a psychologist. niagara falls, actually, are
not the greatest ones, we've measured it, reports national
geographic. the end of the world in two years time (and I
shut the door right in front of them). everyone could drive
a car running on electricity! the nuclear bomb I copied
from my mate. my mom, as soon as she took notice,
ordered me to paste dad in. by analogy there jumped in
Russians, unemployment and pregnancy. I was going to
put the UNKNOWN at the intersection but got fucked off
and stuck just the tongue out.

-all poems previously published in Masthead