Across the street from Spinozas house

/, Blesok no. 99/Across the street from Spinozas house

Across the street from Spinozas house

ACROSS THE STREET FROM SPINOZA"S HOUSE
DESTINY"S CHILD
HIJRA ‘92
RAMONES ON THE BEDROOM WALL
THE FIFTIESafter Adam Zagajewski

so here I am again
observing certain ladies
in the small alley
across the street from Spinoza’s house,
remembering
how ten or so years ago
some of us landed here
‘round about the same time
in desperate search of jobs
reaching with every limb
for those ripe fruits of the democratic West
(or however you’d like to put it):

these ladies subjected to
monetary and flesh exchange
and me pursuing the articles, paragraphs
and subparagraphs
of my esteemed Institution.

and immediately
I begin to realize
that even after a decade
buried in a foreign country
we still have a lot in common:

flexible working hours
suspicion towards other foreigners
and similar modes
of hustling.

I see the absent-minded Heloïse
weaving some embroidery
and Alina
swiftly changing stations on her red transistor-radio
and Amra and Jammila
laughing heartily as they pat the bald head of their big black
friend
while I push
my bicycle
(like a wheel of destiny)
thinking how
at this very moment
from Spinoza’s window
all the way to the last booth with the red lights on
freely and easily bloom and open
(on the whims of Euclidian geometry)
a thousand flowers
of some invisible Bermuda triangle
composed of human petals
dipped deep in the mud
of a so-called better life
like those stones trapped in the kidney channels
of our third-world bodies
that we dragged over here
like decanted sand boats from our Byelorussias, Ukraines,
Ugandas,
Kirgisias, Ghanas, Romanias, Croatias…

only to end up staring at each other
in silence like those eels
in the aquariums
of Chinese restaurants;

and even if somebody would
turn us upside-down
slap us all over and connect us
to some cosmic polygraph
he would sadly be unable
to squeeze out of us
a single line
from Baruch’s great Ethics.

2018-08-21T17:22:36+00:00 November 9th, 2014|Categories: Poetry, Blesok no. 99|0 Comments