The visit

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Spending half the night in a reclining garden chair in the living room isn’t much, but I doubt you could call it sleep deprivation. I did, however, notice an unusual state of euphoria that might suggest my brain is starting to release extra dopamine to compensate for the fatigue, which makes me feel strangely energetic—it’s not even noon yet, and I’ve already written four poems—which is often followed by a crash. I’m so not looking forward to that. The visit was fun, though.

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Fictility

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A French and an American student
meet on a train to Vienna and fall in love
sounds oddly familiar, like a pitch
for a romcom scribbled on a napkin
in one of Tinseltown’s shabby bars
that somehow turned into an epic trilogy,
and your only regret is that you were
neither the scribbler nor the lover,
but at least you’re holding on to something
real.

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Der Jungbrunnen

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Whether it’s a fountain
in the land of the Macrobians,
the Pool of Bethesda, mind uploading
or an occasional botox injection,
it’s hard to shake the feeling
that the eternal youth of our dreams
borders somewhat on everlasting
infancy.

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The mythware

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If one were to compare a human to a computer,
the body would be the hardware and the mind the software,
but what about the soul—the mythware? (Like a unicorn
that was added to the user manual because marketing thought
there should be magic under the hood.)

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Spiritual sobering

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The soul’s place is in the narthex,
getting tipsy on the fumes of incense and holy water,
but it sobers up quickly when faced with the dilemma
of whether to watch Det sjunde inseglet
or Freulein Masseuse.

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A contemporary slur

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I am a jerk,
an arsehole,
a chauvinistic pig,
but I’m supposed to be—
I am a man, after all,
just another
testosterone junkie,
and I’m okay with that
as long as no one
calls out my pussy
as inadequate.

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The question

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I like romcoms
with Hollywood grannies—
when they still fit into the twenties bracket—
not yet afflicted by that ordeal
of the imagination called ‘growing older’,
where there’s no gruesome impudence
but the question: How old are you?
I guess it’s easier with the discreet
Quel âge as-tu?

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The involuntary solipsist

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Call me a heathen, but since time immemorial,
people of my ilk have always had the feeling
that we would rather hear Cage’s Four Thirty-Three at dawn
than listen to the seagullian chorales and rhetoric classes
in magpieese on the accidental agora of our windowsill.
And when I toss and turn furiously in bed at five in the morning,
I can’t help but wonder what third-rate college produced
this intelligent designer.

More words to ponder at maciejmodzelewski.com