[..]

What Happened to Twenty Kilos
Hová tűnt húsz kiló

Where had twenty kilos of István Csukás
gone? There’s a photo of it a year ago,
flesh of my flesh, and well worth thinking on.
Had it ascended to heaven or was it down below?

More important perhaps, most important still,
had a commensurate weight of soul too gone?
From where was it taken, the missing part?
How measure it? What scales to weight it on?

And that piece missing, flesh or spirit, was it
the better part or just some worthless bit?
Was it expendable? Is that why it went?
But what if the remaining part is without merit?

Those twenty kilos were me, since what I ate
had quickly become an aspect of me too!
But what has happened? What power has deprived me?
What purpose is it fattening itself up to?

Have those twenty kilos hunkered down
in nothing’s swollen impregnated span,
waiting for the end, for the birth in reverse
of an embryo drawn from this full grown man?
Is that how it will disappear, kilo by kilo?
And can I talk about myself in the past tense
while living? There’s quite enough of me left in any case
so I’ll drop the subject while it still makes sense.

[..]

Poem for Christmas
Vers Karácsonyra

The winter landscape looks vaguely neurotic and yet
it is the Christchild’s season, nor should we forget
he should be born in our hearts, and his eyes are exhorted to stare
mild-manneredly through each man’s very own blood-infected pair,
for we are to killing inclined, all nails and fangs, no reprieve,
ready to blow up the whole caboodle this pleasant Christmas Eve;
my mind is as fogged as the view through the wintery glass
I desperately grab at whatever still aches or might pass
for pain, or simply is and contains me, if anything does,
and assures us the grandiose visions of Genesis need not end with us,
no sentence is incomplete, no words stuck in the gut
no full stops are required, one big bang ends the lot;
so I mumble like a simpleton and trembling form a prayer:
let there be buds on the branches come the spring of the year,
let there be eyes to see them, and let the sun shine for hours,
let ultraviolet rays befiltered and arrow down like showers,
and let there be stories, forged by past and present, late and soon,
and let night show us the charmingest smile of the moon,
in our hearts let there be both evil and good, let hearts simply exist,
let the struggle that makes a man within the heart persist,
let the spirit sparkle, let it win though defeated,
let it set maypoles on rooftops, surmounted and seated,
let there be birth and death, fit for our stature,
so that we may gaily raise our hats at the bodies’ departure,
let believers exist, and let flourish those who despair beyond hoping,
those who heal wounds, and those who find fresh wounds to open,
let there, let there, let there be those who toll in tomorrow
that there should be no stillbirth this year, no dead child for sorrow.

Twenty Kilos Regained
Visszatért húsz kiló

Twenty kilos of István Csukás regained!
gasping and puffing we put our trousers on.
How to show my gratitude since we don’t like sweets,
and bouquets for gentlemen just isn’t done?

So I raise this glass of beer to it since it no longer matters,
and, it being smaller, quiz it with a superior air:
where have you been, itinerant, errant part of me,
what gods do you worship, what hells do you fear?

What angel nursed you, and what dreams did it whisper
into those degenerating cells of mine
floating like stardust about the universe;
what void or lack did its empty pocket confine?

Because nothing happens by accident, the great
and the small are opposite ends of the same telescope—
it doesn’t matter much which end we peer into
it is God’s hollow eyeballs we confront without hope.
Is this what my birth was like? And do you think
death will be as simple, so easy come, easy gone?
We don’t disappear piecemeal, by degrees, but wholesale,
a monumental lack giving one final yawn.