An indecent thought

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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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Same old same old

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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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Do as the Romans do

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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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A simple recipe

Published on by Maciej Modzelewski1 Comment

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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A day

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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.

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To redeem us

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[…] the point of disagreement is not that I like his body better than he likes mine, but that he likes my mind less than I like his.
Lytton Strachey, from a letter to Leonard Woolf

I don’t believe in unicorns
and beautiful boys entering the picture mid-spring
to redeem love—
or whatever that spree in meadowland is called—
only to turn yet another string of random labels
that our days need to progress
from one misstep to the next.
Besides, I’m not well-adjusted—I wish I were,
or perhaps not; maybe it’s better the way I am—
unlike all the pre-highbrows walking down Charing Cross Road
on rainy Sundays; I’m still struggling with the difference
between pleasing you and joining your tribe.

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The ignoble writing implement

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Why does the word ‘computer’
not have the noble ring of a ‘fountain pen’?
Even a ‘typewriter’ sounds better
than the name of the Difference Engine’s progeny,
though I could always say that I wrote this verse
on my PC (yuck!) or a desktop.

I wonder if the poet had the same problem
when quills had gone out of use.

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The crumpled butt

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In the mornings I sit by the window and read—partially to draw inspiration but mainly to kill time between dates on my future tombstone—but at the same time observe the little world outside, and today I noticed a rather baffling scene. A car stopped by the kerb, and after some erratic movement inside, a middle-aged woman emerged out of it, smoking. She walked aimlessly around the vehicle, her entire focus on the cigarette, but once she finished smoking, she returned to the car and went on her merry way, leaving the crumpled cigarette butt behind. How peculiar.

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