••• XXXIX

there's a hole in my neighbourhood 

down which of late i cannot help but fall

share no sheets

collapse on a bed ticked down by a clock

or the shadow of it

.,.

••• XXXVIII

ruins of a morning

a few day more and i will nestle myself against these well-known scents and temperatures, the dew and all scars after what has gone. 

once i asked myself what you do when you had run out of footprints. i am turning this question around in my mind again and watching it cast shadows, playful and blurry, and soil-flavoured.

.,.

••• XXXVII

one who sows wind harvests thunderstorm

where have you got your tan? so lovely!

asked my mom when i got back in the evening.

on the graveyard.

i answered.

good as any other place for catching the sun before it is above and ruthless.

let us bask in its yet merciful rays together, like idle brothers a decade ago. 

.,.

••• XXXVI

call roll for all flowers beheaded

unless there is anything else lost in the grass.
else than hands of a greying dandelion.

.,.

••• XXXIV

hexed all

ferns reaching out like hands of passed newborns. lost like blindness in amniotic fluid. directed like a cry. for breath.

.,.

••• XXXIII

we didn't even try to save your souls

a concert some nights ago rooting me back in whoever i feel i am. music serving for an anchor again, just like this place always does. a connection to all things ever-running. by ties of pleasure, sorrow and dusky energy.

what kind of child could i possibly become, sliding down along such sidelines? 

not even struck by the cohesion of both planes. 

.,.

••• XXXII

secret me away, will you

a place deepest inside, far away from scaly pillows.

pathway to and fro. found in the absence of Armadillo. no dream.

.,.

••• XXXI

religious trash

reduntant cross-shaped debris, is that what they have made you to? you who was once kneeled before.

i sang when walking around and it turned out that i still remember songs not heard for almost a decade.
play a one of them and suddenly get struck by its accuracy in this very moment, although it has after all been with you for years. the extent to which you become the very songs that you listen to bourders with insanity. having been aware of this peculiar quality of music one connects to, i tried to be careful. and yet this evening happened.

careful what you give your ear to?
and what your vocal cord carry on.


.,.

••• XXX

other gravities

my flesh is calling noctambulism. lately i wish i could make its seams burst by a single scream. yet i walk completely soundless, hearing the the lack of explosion thudding in my ears and deafening them to the point when even the eyes black out for a second.

nobody believes me when i confide that i am scared of graveyards at nighttime. a few minutes usually is enough for me to vocalize all the moving branches, whispers in the leaves, grass pinches, stone bones, flashing eyes and shadows stretching their arms towards any oversensitive imagination. i am thus immersed in darkness and despite all those years it still is not my element. nor do i wish it to be.

walking barefoot in search of the moon. let the asphalt under your skin.
and a song about voyage that sounds inevitably like falling.

.,.

••• XXIX

sad to satiety

humankind! be wiser, can you. can i? waking up at midnight to quench the most absurd cravings and clothe them in a graveyard image.

reading drew me back to Japanese prose lately and reminded of the reason why i value it so highly. passions harnessed by very fine, and astonishingly thin, threads. stories about the untold. just like my dear bemossed place. so far, it has been for everything that i could not or would not say aloud. i might have annulled this boundary lately.

.,.

••• XXVIII

is there other way to blue

it has been a long time since i added this photo. a long moment of lockdown. a tearing need of a heaven to breathe. the moment i needed a kick and i launched a documentary on Nick. his and only his sequences, seems like they seep from the same place. i scent wood and a dim, warm light in the middle of the night. weak but persistent. nightlong monologues with yourself or imaginary disputants. ideas of closeness. communion on the verge of skin.

sometimes i feel like this over there, in my cemetery. when i look up at the sky, it seems to belong to the macrocosm and summons its reflection in me. the solitude, whistling grasses and the voice of a man from behind the veil.

we are cold but not coldest.

there come times when this is enough.

.,.

••• XXVII

day without a day

two months without sun. you could imagine it can only make one feel safe to the point of claustrophilia, as if the sky turned into a ceiling of a cardboard box. instead, you wake up each morning, your skin at the verge of breaking from its longing for a single ray, the silence beating into it a certainty: there is a hole somewhere and it's leaking.

looking at this picture, it is not difficult to realize why i love st. Jacob in its all bits. this hole-feeted tree, doesn't it remind you of one redemptor once upon a time? woodcut stigmata. for me - pillars of the world.

there is a chasm yawning, wonder if i can seal it without my trees.

a tabernacle lacking the back wall. save yourself, little saviour. while they still are singing.

.,.

••• XXVI

if there is no sun, it could at least turn dark

everything smells time in this place. the old trees growing into the grinds, against the graves, out of themselves. holes in their bellies, an adult could coil within their borders. return to the darkness which once meant nothing but safety. there was never a monster or a threatening claw, only a heartbeat roofing your existence.

when i look at them, i sense something old and bare. strong by its exposure. i miss mu communions with both of these.

.,.

••• XXV

spaces inbetween

a dash between the dates, a space taken from someone's love confession. all the spaces inbetween to which words owe the fullness of meaning. this is what i ponder on, watching this building. i imagine that i have a driving licence and stop by in this narrow alley parting it from the graveyard area, by this very building and its gaping eyes. windows. the lights are like on Tomasz Stańko's album cover. i sit still and yet i seem to speed through the air. the burnt bricks, broken panes and bricked-up windows. scars of fire faded decades ago, now colder than the asphalt of the emptiest street. i am pretty sure they burn on the inside.

darkest eyes, but their colour is far from black. light absorption on the full - is this a quality of iris or are the pupils this huge? not of fear, but of truth. and the fascination for it.

.,.

••• XXIV

haka-yoku

the Japanese term shinrin-yoku may literally mean forest bathing, as i have just read. if you switch the forest part for a grave one, you would probably produce a very accurate name for my natural tendencies of turning to graves when in search of equilibrium or refuge.

the customized term would be then grave bathing, haka-yoku. does it sound as silently to your ears as it does to mine? a true reflection in language, i almost feel how my muscles relax and how deeply i exhale. the relief of being home without posessing it.

there must be someone out there to whom the graves also appear like door in the ground. curtained with soft moss, green blades brushing solace into your skin as you fall through. this is enough to make the sleepiness set over my eyelids as i write these words, and i should not sleep. we all know how this kin meanders.

.,.

••• XXIII

division bell

sati - existence, real being, essential sound

rāgaḥ - love, feeling, musical scale

i love how yoga philosophy tightly connects life, truth, love and music, my life's only guidelines. to think about it on a catholic cemetery might appear odd to some. but is it really? doesn't this place show that death has a life of its own? and its own silence, an underlying genre of music.

the resins here glue together these seeming dichotomies, division bells do not reach me. i look at the the Christ and the leaf that soothes his head. the solace descends, a unique kind of peace you can find on a graveyard. salvation in a union with death. a life-scented departure.

.,.

••• XXII

shook out my salvation in all four corners of my room

isn't this touching? now you will perhaps understand better why i come back here time after time, seduced by longing. taking pictures is never my intention, yet i end up snapping the mobile lens to preserve these crumbs.

still life in the middle of a necropolis, a double one since it obtained the status of a sights. a tomb for tombs. and your beating heart in the middle of it.
there you stand, above a grave whose cross was stolen by the scrap collectors, imagining the hands that composed this twig cross. come back to touch the ground with a running life. sap like blood.

still life among the iron bars

.,.

••• XXI

little tin saviour

little tin saviour, did any ever go on his own from this place to blessedness? if i may ask you with the words of a song. if even your arms gave in and your feet  could not resist the force of friction. is it your heart that holds you to the cross or is it the rust?

for you would not jump into fire for a dubious task. this, i guess, is where gods and humans differ.

.,.

••• XX

lady nevermore

meet my grave companions. none of them is called Thought or Memory and i still have two eyes. all of them seem to descend from Odin's breed, however, and my sight is sharp, yet crooked.

with the crows around i cannot resist the feeling of an ancient bond that presses soil harder to my foot soles until it enters the blood. pupils set, heart beating like one of Lady Nevermore's. she is the mistress of contrast, adept of simplicity. bringing life to very few substantial aspects she makes it bare: the alternatives are only two. no polarity scales. no colour diagrams to confuse senses. no excuses.

she feels the air pending

her chest rises

.,.

••• XIX

innocence to break your bones

for the ethereal can be ferocious and the delicate can be determined. this is when stone breaks under silent wax.

i love to think this way. after all, constance is the quintessence of my in- and external pathways. to be tough without loosing the softness is to walk the border. it lies alongside cracklines

.,.

••• XVIII

the sky's gone out

oblivious to these trees for so long and only now did they dawn on me. black and dragging up to the sky, slowly and inevitably. resembling threads of black vermicelli, which loses its sound and weight in english.

in polish makaron [pasta] lies vocally so tightly close to maszkaron [an ugly deformed creature] and vibrates half-absurdly and half-sinisterly. wildly. silently pouring upwards. cutting the vision into comprehendible pieces. shadows directing your steps. your sense of perspective. the world tree - is it many now? thin-trunked and wicked?

.,.

••• XVII

called by the fire

the cemetery and its chapel burnt many times and each fire made it what fire does - bared, purified. ennobled. there is always a scent of smoke lingering in its air, or maybe only my recollections are most vivid when they spring from autumn.

improbably as it may sound, only after i chose the title for this photo i noticed the fading letters on the background picture: smoking strictly prohibited. yet again coincidence becomes a matter of perspective.

.,.

••• XVI

any kind of embrace

for if there is no one to call your name in the deep of the night, any arms will do. moss will always caress its almost-human moisture and countless fingers will make you believe in cuticle symbiosis. you will rest your head on the chest of a stranger.

while for some it might be tempting to scratch off this fragile skin, i let it be. names rest unveiled. overgrown into oblivion.

.,.

••• XV

you are a dot on a graveyard map

has this not stopped the time for you even once? looking up your place and finding it among the dead. most often glaring red among the mazes of pathways and sectors. a cartographic memento mori crowned with your uncertainty.

and a frosted flower to seal it

ascention put on hold

just for today

an artificial flower will do

.,.

••• XIV

come find the meaning of the word inside of me

after all, aren't we all boats touching each other at sea

and yet so completely oblivious to each other's existence
brittle facades

all that is thirst in the horizon-filling pools

XXI, the age of mass-born Tantalus

.,.

••• XIII

did not worship god in fitting ways

for the outsiders nest also in the innermost circle, looking around in yet another place they thought they would fit. and they do. only not completely.

this is when you find yourself looking for your right arm in the middle of the night, although you know how scared you are of this place after dark. traversing the grass shadows and blackness of trees swallowed by the sky. deeply aware that your presence here has always defied any rules of worship.

to see vital sparks in a place safely labelled a necropolis
glaring transgression against the sleepiness of sheep

21st century, Thanatos and Morpheus are still a close kin

.,.

••• XII

Beast and the Beast

Beauty can be found betwixt and between. on days when i take her place, i rest by this tree and recall the Disney adaptation. the story told in stained glass pictures, high contrast and november-spirited wind. icy rain crashing against stone stairs. a person running in the downpour, hot and freezing at the same time. her breath seeped through the branches matting above the hole where her halo used to hang.

as much as soft grounds bring relief at times, a land too miry can steal all your breath. this is when your dreams turn towards the firmness of a stone and the roughness of black bark. the dream of a waterdrop meeting a rock within acoustics of a cavern.

.,.

••• XI

radioactive toy

acid moss whispers for you soil fairy tales, fluorescent nursery rhymes at your service. if only you wanted to sleep.

instead, kept awake by ambience of violence, you seek scars left after the vandals. violators who entered this place with hammers, matches and hard soles. you search for places where the ground still trembles, false scabs. wishing for freedom to destroy in your own, resurrective way.

.,.

••• X

to find a cooler place in the grass

today i madly miss this place. its serenity and voiceless wisdom. no voice does not mean no sound. it is a heavy, leaden one. a drone pouring with a gravity that you cannot resist and wish not to surrender. you focus your sight on the tiny blue flowers and let the things pass in a dreamlike gust.

slow behadings

no sound of collapse

.,.

••• IX

until light takes us

through cracks the light shines in, i was once told by a true friend. the first man who saw me for real. this line made me cry many times, out of its saturation and the everlasting question if there can be beauty in a scar.

and most of all - because my answer is yes. there is beauty of how you wear it and how it refined you. how relentlessly you strive for illumination. there is redemption, although of the saddest aftertaste. veins breaking through stone.

.,.

••• VIII

mistaken for strangers

it looks empty but it doesn't feel so.

i know it sounds familiar.

so tempting to find a material reflection, something your eye could cling onto so that the heart would not need to beat so hard. pump the pulse out of the ground after all this running.

after all this running

.,.

••• VII

the skin gives me someplace to stay

when your home country blows its own rooftops, spitting ahead of its own steps - you know which door to command. wondering no longer that you better fit its necropolises than its feasts.

.,.

••• VI

for my soul has its own light

and its own, from the Sun independent

darkness

you might wonder why i do not choose a better lighting for the images. well, does life? do you discover your world if and only if the light is perfect, the shadows fine enough to give everything the right depth in order to interest the eye? i seriously doubt.

so do i happen to weave my way in there quite often on these whatevergreyish days when the skyscape makes no sense. let us embrace it. photography may deem it dull but my objective is bare authenticity. i don't mind a spot on my lover's skin. for my lens imperfection makes the new superhuman, and truth is the new beauty.

.,.

••• V

Pandora's locket

let me stray. my admiration for myths and legends far exceeds the norm for a modern woman that i am. although i love them just as they are, my inner eyes roam on their own terms. after seeing the view above - bemossed grave and a candle nested in it - their focus fell on Pandora.

the whiteness and openness of this grave candle made them ask: what if the box was another metaphor and Zeus' gift was more like a delicate yet powerful locket? what if the radiance and innocence it held was only labelled a plague to scare off her seeking hands? and after its opening, the brightness embracing the whole world made it bare. showed a distinction, like another story's apple.

this light made all the twisted things existing obvious in their wicked forms. they were many a number and the human could not bear the view, the weight of their own guilt and the labour to make everything right. but there she stood, the one who brought the contrast, the lucent scapegoat.

have you called her names, too?

.,.

••• IV

death whispered a lullaby

i could hold you blindfolded on the threshold much longer. instead, we will leave the surroundings for later and now surrender to a recollection. when i was thinking about home. the real one, found within most unexpected borders.

turned away into a thousand dreams

found out what they mean

back then, one question remained unanswered: if an angel falls in a forest and nobody has seen him, does he make a sound?

this is when the time stopped.

the air was moving in a different way.

my eyelids fell.

low, down to my heart, down to my feet.

.,.

••• III

blood from the air

we are almost there. we have just passed by the city hall and following the street up. the city theatre, the library building. the bridge.

and the tracks underneath, framed in rust no longer - but i remember. my prelude colours, the smell of metal after the rain. the flaking paint. the mist condensing downwards. my fingers around the bars, nails painted moonwhite, as i call this hue. hypnotic. a wet and dirty release under an unspecified sky.

i find st. jacob's exceptional on days like these. the humidity gives air richer notes. 

everything comes uninvoked.

and the metal posts peeling like knees of child who has just tripped over and got rejected by the cobbles. you see the blood but nothing is dripping. stings of air, blood plasma and dirt. burning life.

.,.

••• II

secret garden

do not think i will let you in there so easily. you need to make a journey just like i do anytime i come by. it is a part of the visit, sometimes the most important part.

so tell me, did you also rummage through you gransparents' wardrobes and cupboards on a gray rainy day? do you remember that feeling when you pulled the drawer and for a second you wildly hoped a new box would appear, or that you missed something in the farthest corner. as it faded, you faithfully went through every single box, checking all old diodes, the heavy leather camera case, the tin box with dog-eared postcards, faded photographs taken out of the black-sided albums, grandfathers old honorary medals... it could take an hour or so and, eventually, you would find nothing new. but the faith, the smell of something almost physically close, so close that you could tell there is a scent lingering in the air but not close enough for you to register any notes - they tempted you back.

this wall is no exception. as the graveyard is situated on a hill, the wall hold the side of it that faces the street. recently it has been renovated and i am still mourning this rational gambit. luckily again, it is saved within my lens. although i miss it, it feels as if someone installed automatic plastic door instead of the regular entrance to the secret garden. 

it maybe is a mere detail. or - is it?

these bricks carry are varnished in many layers with my imagination. each scrape is a potential story, a reason, a splinter of energy. a statement. all of them question marks, triggers of clay. like Neil Gaiman's childhood door hiding a wall. you face it and every time you can smell a mystery.

a crumbling wall under a graveyard hill. did the bricks fall apart on their own or did someone try to break through it? why so? we will never know. for even if the key remains, the door have been replaced by a neat polished wall. despite the key, the lock is no longer.

.,.

••• I

antidecade

there is a place in my hometown i always visit. ten years have passed since my foot first trod its fading paths. over this time it has become more of a companion than a spot on the city map. a haven in its very heart. and a key to mine, as i was soon to find out.

lucky enough to have my first visit captured, i share it with you as the first entry. aged seventeen and already walking so many borderlines. you will hear about them in due time because they have been growing on me ever since. until then, let us laugh together at the entering circumstances. a teenage kinda-dark, kinda-goth version of me taking part in a vampire photostory of a dubious plot. looking grim, kissing forbiddenly and dying on a gravestone among snapshots captured by a photographic antitalent nicknamed... Satan.

so far, creating this website is much darker an undertaking than my most highschool-nightly-inclined capabilities could ever make me imagine. a blog for a graveyard - it still sounds unbelievably, even for my very ears. a few weeks ago, when this idea shone up in the back of my head for the first time, i found it so ridiculous that i instantly chose instagram for my media of choice - as the least suitable one.

i truly wonder what will follow.

enjoy the young and mistakeful version of me, in november morning and vampire disgrace.

a long time ago. from now on -

fire walk with me.

.,.