First of May

¹ Nothing's hurt me for five days now: cocaine anesthesia as the desired effect, not a side effect. The line works simultaneously as chemical and existential diagnosis — I don't miss my ex because the substance is numbing the receptors, but also: I don't miss my ex, period. The border between those two meanings dissolves, and that is the track's central subject.

² Small flat, small me, nanny and mania: a self-portrait of a 28-year-old in Poland, 2026. "Tiny me" isn't regression to childhood but a statement of adult scale — a grown person still on the receiving end of family care (nanny standing in for mother/father/sister). "Mania" is the manic state the narrator is entering — not a diminutive of Marianna, not marijuana. Four nouns as the full inventory of a life situation: the space, the self, the one who takes care of me, and the diagnosis.

³ Nanny Basia, mania Christ — of the opinion / That from drinking the face swells, the head goes silent: an enjambment in which "of the opinion" belongs to "mania": the mania is of the opinion that… The speaker betrays an inner voice — his own mania telling him he's falling apart. An alien voice slipped without quotation marks into first-person narration. Technically difficult, because it asks the listener to double back across the line break to decode the syntax.

⁴ Spit on the synagogue and on the church / Or at least flick a cig at that church: Kazimierz as setting, antisemitism as an observed, not shared, mood. The first line quotes the surrounding mentality; the second is the narrator's ironic reply: if you're going to be transgressive, at least be symmetric. A critique of antisemitism hidden inside mimicry — the listener without context hears antisemitism, the listener with context hears its unmasking. A risky move.

⁵ Marching, offi— no, the mayors of the city: the micro-drama of a mid-flight correction. The narrator starts "officers" (the police), stops, because the police are absent from tourist Cracow, and substitutes "city mayors" (municipal presidents — us, the stoned crew, who rule the city by night because no one else is doing the job). An anarchist declaration inside a slip of the tongue. A transcript of thought in statu nascendi, not a finished verdict.

⁶ Four, Tom and Jerry, Mary Jane and Spitfires: Tomek (Tom), Bartosz (short, hence Jerry), marijuana (Mary Jane), planes over Ukraine and Iran (Spitfires). Four elements of the evening: two specific people, a substance, and distant wars as media backdrop. The last item knocks the track out of its party narration — while we're out in Cracow, fighters are flying somewhere. A disparity of scale without commentary, carried by juxtaposition alone.

⁷ Pass a Heet, pass a blue Camel: an ode to the Cracovian "give me." Not only a request for a cigarette but a record of a local ethos of mutual distribution — whoever has, gives, without expectation of return. A Heet (IQOS) and a blue Camel in the same pocket is a portrait of a transitional smoker, between an old habit and a new device, two nicotine delivery systems at once.

⁸ And when I hear give me, I give, 'cause it's May Day: Labor Day as a private alibi. The narrator is on leave from his startup, so he can share everything because he doesn't have to produce anything. But the line also works more broadly, against the author's intent — "May Day" as a figure for any day that becomes a reason to give, because any reason is as good as another. The date as an empty marker.

⁹ Computer hums again and muffles my heart: Claude (or another AI) as a participant in the evening. Conversation with a language model as a technique for dampening emotion, functionally parallel to the cocaine of the first line. Both help you not feel too strongly. Both work; both have costs. The line is meta — the text is being written inside the same conversation it describes, so the computer that hums is exactly the computer on which the line is being written.

¹⁰ And I'd record a track about it, number two, Poland's anthem after the Rota: the announcement of a second track in the cycle as a new anthem after a coup. Konopnicka's "Rota" from 1908 ("We shall not forsake the land of our race") has repeatedly been proposed as Poland's alternative anthem — this would be the third, for a Poland after a political catastrophe, in which city mayors are the stoned crew and the patriotic act is murder on a Sopot pier. The end of the line: from "nothing hurts me" through Cracow, buddies, the ex, the Spitfires, to a hypothetical coup and a new anthem. The text closes on a national scale, having begun on the scale of the body.