Patina

They’ve said "see you" and never seen each other again

They’ve said "love you" and never loved each other again

This isn’t a poem about leaving

But about moving forward

And it’s slight nuances

(forgetting and remembering which aren’t antonyms at all)

It’s about repetition

About time

About the sunbeams so sharp they found a way to your bones

The hills, loud neighbours, overripe peaches, phantom feeling of a spiderweb on your face.

Grandpa has 17 scars on his body, it’s unbelievable, one wouldn’t say he’s scarred at least not at the first sight, just one scar is really big—the one that splits his stomach into two parts—the left and the right one, maybe it’a good one and a better one or Czech and Slovak one, maybe he got it when they’ve split Czechoslovakia, he lived in a small Slovak town but he speaks Czech till today, or at least mostly Czech; he probably got it during his last parachute jump he did in the name of country that doesn’t exist anymore but it feels like it wants to exist again, what has to be very confusing—they give you a scar and then… remove, leave, leave, remove, hug, snuggle, offend, walk over; that leaves a scars not only on the body.

Some of them—those on his legs and forearms definitely come from parachuting or other dangerous military manoeuvres.

The other ones are small scars that men and boys used to have, no one remembers how exactly they got them or since when they’re there,

I only have two scars—after surgical removal of birth marks—but I’ll remember them forever.

But back to the part about moving forward, which, as I already mentioned is about remembering but also about forgetting—about important moments, the ones that belong to a diary, all of the birthdays, baptisms, fractures… dreams, careers, palms, eyes…

It’s strange that sometimes I can’t remember what does somebody’s eyes or hands or neck or nostrils look like but I always remember what kind of wine or coffee they drink, whether short or long ones, whether they look with the cigarette as if they had a long scar across their face or other way around—they look gorgeous with it as a prediction of something beautiful, yes, truly, there are people who can have a cigarette and there is all the glory of this world in it, there’s a poetry written in a free verse in it, but being free doesn’t mean not having any rules—same as with smoking cigarettes.

"Hunty, go buy me some cigarettes."

"What type?"

"Doesn’t matter, I smoke everything red and short," said a very old man to Judy while she was cutting his beard so he wouldn’t trip on it anymore.

So this clearly means that…

No one can say that chickens are not flightless birds because they can’t fly too far, maybe they are unwillingly flightless, they remind me of someone who’s name I can’t use because the only thing she would take from it would be the comparison to chicken. It must be painful to spend your whole life trying to understand someone and to constantly see how their language is becoming less and less familiar to you and how people comment his poems saying it’s beautiful but she doesn’t see poems because they don’t rhyme, she sees that I compare her to a chicken and of course, as every mum, she’s wrong. I compare her more to the sun from which one couldn’t hide and didn’t actually want to, how we’ve played badminton and she never had to let me win. I compare her to the fact that the last soup she cooked was worse than the first one I made, what a strange cycle of the genealogy of soups. Chicken broths and caresses which no one ever saw but everyone always knew. How slowly do the whipped memories leave, how heavily they jump over the traps of the eternal spiralling of the DNA and how they remind me of something I can’t name without knowing it would sound ridiculous.