Faith is a perishable good with a somewhat intimidating scent
of respectability, a late symbol of our exalted humilitude—
as if café au lait wasn’t enough—and it makes me think
of the last day of the Inquisition and of clerks burning old paperwork
and auctioning off no longer needed instruments of torture
to be repurposed as it fits.
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My object-free life
sometimes needs something more
tangible yet obtuse, so it wouldn’t hurt
when it touches the fettle
that comes with a myriad of attempts,
like all that prying used to:
‘Where are you off to?’
I guess I still need time.
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The treasured few amongst the plastic army—the tin soldiers—that would forever be remembered as the toxic delight of my early youth went missing somewhere along the way to adulthood, and besides, I had outgrown my childhood toys, so for my twentysomething birthday, I bought myself a gas mask in an army surplus store, and now even that has disappeared somewhere during my excessive itineration. So I wonder if I have lost nothing but insignificant memorabilia or perhaps a fragment of my soul.
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It started as an innocent jest made by a friend to lighten the mood after my bitter remarks on the shrinking job market and the fact that poetry is all but a hobby. He created a page with information about the next Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom, who in 2029 will replace the current holder of the position, Simon Armitage—apparently it’s supposed to be me. And while I am a poet, my less than modest readership clearly indicates that I’m nowhere near being called a professional, which is surely one of the many requirements of the job. Besides, I’m not even British. And yet…
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In a closed game I mostly play myself,
navigating through days with hoary household appliances—
which permits only nontactical positional manoeuvring—
just to keep up with a simple chore list.
And then comes the pressure of Zeitnot,
which makes mistakes more likely,
but in the end, does it really matter whether you win or lose?
After all, the dead are impervious to either fame or shame.
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If life, instead of years, were measured by volumes,
what would mine be like—
reminiscent of À la recherche du temps perdu
or Homo faber. Ein Bericht?
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Being a native speaker is certainly very convenient, but it often makes you also blind to the idiosyncrasies of your language. After all, you absorb it with your mother’s milk (is that why they call it a mother tongue?), so you think nothing of it. To give an example, I never noticed that one of the constructs in my native Polish violated logic—well, even if it doesn’t inherently do so, a negative concord definitely does seem counterintuitive to formal logical systems—until I started learning English. But learning the latter is not without its own challenges, one of the biggest being articles—something completely alien to me, since they don’t exist in Polish. They simply make no sense to me. I could say, ‘When in Rome, do as the Romans do’, but I don’t think that proverb is the most fitting here.
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The frail constitution of conscience,
the assumed brevity of spirit,
and the calculated immodesty of mind,
all curtained with a green palette—
courtesy of a linden bathed in sunlight—
is a simple recipe for disaster
or a poem.
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I wake up early in the morning—usually around six, unless I can’t sleep at all; though recently that happens on rare occasions—and prepare some flatbread dough to bake, then do a pinch of yoga for my ageing spine, and finally sit by the window to read, which I try to do for at least an hour, but there is only so much my temporal lobe and Broca’s area can muster. Once I retire from the reading spot, it’s time to write a line or two before I fill my belly and start another nine-to-five as a proud member of the remote task force. Lunchtime starts with a second yoga session, then comes light aliment and a few pages to peruse over before returning to work. The evening chore that some call dinner marks the arrival of crepuscule with all the fun I’ve been dying to indulge in but am too spent to pursue. And then it’s time to find comfort in the arms of Hypnos, who may one day introduce me to his brother—if I’m lucky.
More words to ponder at maciejmodzelewski.com
hidden pilcrow 