Category: poetry

Here are my poems in English and Polish.

One word

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Whether I close my eyes or the curtains, nothing makes me so bold as to strip
the act of performed nightly routines of their supposed innocence,
and yet here and there I catch a flicker of doubt creeping onto the page,
occasionally jamming the typewriter or spilling out in an inkblot
as if it were the revenge of a worn-out fountain pen I was given when I came of age.

At least the pencil maintains a semblance of decency—which is a little unsettling
since it’s not my favourite writing implement—so I wonder if it might help me
retrieve from the rubble I’ve hoarded over the years the one word I need most.
Perhaps then I will learn what I’ve been looking for so desperately all this time,
even if it’s only enough for a brass plaque on the backrest of a park bench.

A day never lasts past midnight

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A day never lasts past midnight,
and sure, you can always say a new one has just arrived,
but what if the previous one didn’t have a chance to toll its end,
neither moving forward nor melting away like a stuck celluloid frame,
and—though you might have bid it farewell by closing the curtains,
expecting nothing but a clean slate, even if a few occasional scratches
marked the coming morning—it turned into a galling tinnitus
amidst the cries of a peacock? Would you rather ignore it
or reveal its unseemly secrets?

I stay in the grey town

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A random phrase from a poet, like an earworm—and not because I’ve read the poem,
but because I’ve seen the despair—makes me realise that ‘nice’ wasn’t all that good;

in fact, it wasn’t good at all, and yet I still remember you asking if it was enough for me
to read one book, listen to one song, fall for one person, or at least pretend to, and so on,

in order to satisfy what for you hardly constituted seeking to live one’s life. Perhaps
that’s why you took the bus one morning to wherever the driver promised to take you.

The warmth of another arm

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My bed is too small even for me, let alone another person—or maybe it’s just my life
that has shrunk somewhere along the way—yet when I wake up in the middle of the night,
I instinctively reach out for the warmth of another arm, knowing we’re not all that different
from mayflies.

An act of a man

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What if the fate of humanity depended on a single, random act of a man,
no matter how insignificant—sort of like a Sunday parish raffle,
but with our very existence at stake?

Fairness aside, what are the chances we would survive such a trial?

Being a poet, not a statistician, I can’t really calculate the odds,
though since even on the battlefield there are occasional acts of kindness,
we might be just fine.

But if something like glueing a nail upright to a pavement slab
that I stumbled upon on my evening stroll is not an isolated incident,
then we are eternally screwed.

To be alive

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Aches and pains always catch us in the act
of living, yet we still treat them as a gravely
irritating inconvenience, usually treatable
with over-the-counter remedies,
to which I can’t help but respond
with a proverb from my mother tongue:
If, after forty, you wake up in the morning
and nothing hurts, it means
you have died.

By the sea

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Having lived by the sea for two decades, I can’t believe I’ve never swam in it,
and while it’s true that it is the North Sea, that’s still a poor excuse on my part,
since the locals have no problem with it, even in January—though, to be fair,
not without a wetsuit then. But perhaps more than the temperature of the water,
it’s the starkness of my exposed inadequacy that scares me. After all, I’m nothing
but the sum of past abasements.

In pursuit of the reader

Published on by Maciej Modzelewski2 Comments

Even the smallest gap in the curtains
might find its peeping Tom—so there is always hope
for the closet poet—yet finding readers proves no easy feat
for the wordsmith in disguise, who has learnt the difference
between epistemology and epistolography
but has never managed to navigate
the intricacies of the modern sock drawer
(as he sees the algorithm-driven blogosphere realm).

Perhaps a premature demise is the answer,
although it only works when real,
as we know from Ms. Meachen’s story.
Besides, the fame gained in this way
is of no consequence to the person concerned,
regardless of whether there is life after death or not.
After all, there is no fun in bidding against others
when the only currency you have is the obol.