Poetry
Breading itself
Breading itself,
the starter stirs,
no effort made,
just bubblinating.
Slow fermentation,
essential biological processes.
Quite thick,
quite sour,
a hardworking one.
Oh sourdough starter,
how you work,
simply by being,
simply by breathing
and metabolising,
you create culture,
greater than the personal culture
of some people.
You are a symbiosis,
a mixture of bacteria
and many other beings.
How is it
that in my little jar
they coexist without obstacles,
while at the level of human society,
we keep falling apart?
Bacteria have no politics,
yeast has no history.
They have no interests,
beyond fermentation
and they don’t build identity
on the suffering of other symbiotic cultures.
If bacteria had a political instinct,
there would have been a war
in my jar long ago.
Left vs right,
commercial yeast vs organic,
the gluten vs gluten-free divide,
and a referendum
on fermentation temperature.
Maybe I’ll just:
bake this bread,
eat this bread,
and see if it tastes better
than these musings.
Biodegradable Waste
I am biodegradable waste,
I decompose relatively fast.
My corpse won’t poison the environment,
or at least not more
than I poison it while alive.
I am biodegradable waste,
and I’m proud of it.
In the deposit return scheme,
I can give back kidneys, liver, heart,
not the brain, the brain spoils too fast.
I am biodegradable waste,
please don’t throw me in with the general waste,
only in the brown bin, with the compost,
I’ll be just fine in there with:
chicken carcass, leftovers from dinners,
animal tissue and all that food
bought just to end up there with me.
At least I won’t be hungry,
me and the other trash, we’ll make ourselves
a decent compost.
Maybe Mrs. Earthworm will even drop by,
and we’ll pretend it’s California.
Pretending to sip beer from a can
that shouldn’t be in there in the first place.
But better not throw me in there,
because human corpses get processed differently
than the corpses of animals from supermarkets.
With a bit of luck, there’s also
recycling of the soul.
And maybe after death I’ll be a plastic bottle,
with an integral eco-cap,
the bane of the Polish right.
I am biodegradable waste,
meaning I am a human animal.
ecce homo, ecce trash.