The shots will disappear
The
supermarket
melts like a chocolate
bar:
a
dendrite stack. Somebody, with a chic scarf
around her neck, rearranges tissues, sighs.
Don’t I
have anything?
dialectic
tendons. Drugs.
Whale brains on the
conveyor belt. (un marinero)
Satyrs passed the dialogue a volleyball.
Dreams circled
like hawks.
Down the vines of
verses the vervets
of words
disappear in a jungle of meanings, their
howls bounce off the
foliage. a diagram.
veiled horse-frogs. Microfrankenstein.
scrutiny & vice versa.
I was 16 years
old once. (historial médico)
High
quality
visibility,
bioethics, computer.
awareness enabled
like night vision,
(el dirigible)
a waterfall plunges from
the roof of Mrówkowiec,[1]
leftovers
of yellow paint
the man wasn’t arranged
in parallel, a
surplus of impressions after a lavish day.
he swam over a coral reef,
glowing viscera translucent ribs
the fossil of olympic
nectar.
A
hesitation after passing the Pillars
of Hercules,
a
sheaf
of electric
sparks in the abysses of the brain:
lightning between the synapses
fruit
of a funny misunderstanding
faith in a deeper failure.
inside the brain,
wind into the
nervous system.
over the span of the bridge from Bristol
to Newport,
a hydroelectric plant,
yourself
unreflected
in the water
the thumb after vanishing.
a stained-glass brain in the rosette of the
skull.
the
more embarrassed that I’m still talking.
Scanner,
now you’re a diode.
infinity swells like
a balloon. blossoms, swells,
a semi-breathing form of life,
beam of dimensions
from its own impassable center,
like some medieval work,
lemme have a drink
of anchors’ brew,
tassels of hair were
flowing down the window
the porter dragged a tired donkey
in the soul of the Trabant
the chip fell,
the monk
scuffled among the yataghans
The
Automat’s Brother.
slithered into the dark den,
with
faded sequins.
My crosshairs broke, frozen
tortes
the Terminator with a bunch
of keys to
crack the cryptogram.
I knelt to tie a shoelace,
like
a sick apple leaf. Tubers
of Words.
a bunch of stratified vegetables. I picked up
a cracked clam shell,
the runway for a sluggish fly.
In a glass a tea stone from a
thousand years ago.
I saw Genghis Khan’s army on motorcycles.
an old
sprocket.
over
the grass of proverbs.
the
majorette, twirling
a baton, the moon is
shining.
I can only divine the
half silence
I saw the tombstones of medieval bishops.
faces flat like plates,
a canopy of cross-ribbed
vaults
we’ll pass under the sky-high portal,
a sculpted history of dreams strung together.
after connecting to the
integrated circuit, which
mindless
coagulation
the cybernetic ecstasy
with heart
rate of the paradox
of existence.
a generator powered by the
gyrations of the solar system.
the smell of burnt flesh from the
chest.
by the blast furnaces,
it's good that
they weren’t human bones.
I’m coming to you, my missed opportunities,
via
particles of humid
air during a storm, an anchor made of fragile
palm
glass,
the frosty
herald of a chimerical autumn,
burn, experiences, in
the heap of Words.
Dunk sans bunk
the violet
Volkswagen the vitality of
Ricky.
Oh, marsh mermaid, poviat weekends.
at a stall with souvenirs
& white arms,
near the tram terminus,
she sends a rocket full of tears,
impersonal tears, tears that
don’t need tariffs
dead sparrow.
the concert crowd
Harps of ribs.
in the landfill of traumas
mycobacteria mold.
the bunk of fulfillment
in the middle of nowhere by a stream––CCTV.
Reading is a way to cover your face.
Brass flemingos.
Crab-claws in the air! Anarchy in the forest! Electro-ego!
’Tis the season –– the
smell of shit & earth. The whoosh of mast lines with flags.
In such cases, you need a plan that’ll throw
rhetoric off-balance;
rhetoric
like a fog in a landfill of Myth.
It was supposed to be natural speech but we ended up with liminal
speech.
When I warm up to a girl, she goes
home.
Here's a phrase at midnight: the vines wrap around the terrace and, it
seems,
start to replace the suspenders, the fog once more, of diluted
thoughts, dandelions in the stomach.
A comma between beginning and end.
I think only singing unites
word with body
when you return home thru
the dogma,
the jungle.
Some,
what. Somewhat
& nowise. Smothering.
Geometry be a thing of the past
with an explosion of nothingness
that unfolds,
cleaves,
deprivation. A flash
of stupidity, unrequested, &
this maybe be a construct. Nothing
being. Nothing’s
off the leash.
Visits of emptiness.
Emptiness visits the night.
Detours from sleep, towards
clear
vision
what appears
beyond the senses
as natural,
consorting
soundless,
necessary,
unlimited
(type “so”
& the program
suggests:
“soaring”)
Robert ‘Ryba’ Rybicki was born in Rybnik in 1976. A poet, translator, squatter (at times) and self-described ‘happener,’ Rybicki is the author of nine books of poetry, including Epifanie i katatonie [Epiphanies & Catatonics], Masakra kalaczakra [Kalachakra massacre], and Podręcznik naukowy dla onironautów [A Scientific Handbook for Oneironauts]. He served as the former editor of the artistic magazine Plama in Rybnik as well as the Polish weekly Nowy Czas [New Time] in London. His collection Dar Meneli [The Squatters’ Gift] was the winner of the Juliusz Upper Silesian Literary Award in 2018. He currently lives in Kraków and organizes literary events there.
Mark Tardi is the author of The Circus of Trust, Airport music, and Euclid Shudders. Prologue, an award-winning cinepoem collaboration with Polish multimedia artist Adam Mańkowski, has been screened at film festivals throughout Europe and the United States. Recent work and translations have appeared or are forthcoming in Notre Dame Review, Asymptote, Anomaly, Periodicities, and Berlin Quarterly. His translation of The Squatters’ Gift by Robert Rybicki is forthcoming from Dalkey Archive Press in 2021. He was a writer-in-residence at MASS MoCA in January 2020 and will be a research fellow at the Harry Ransom Center in 2021. A former Fulbright scholar, he is on faculty at the University of Łódź.
[1] Mrówkowiec (loosely translated, Ant Farm Estates) is an enormous eleven-story building erected in Wrocław in the mid-1960s which houses some two-thousand residents in nearly six-hundred apartments.