pencil sketch of a couple holding hands while walking in the city center

Paper bridges burn last

Published on by Maciej Modzelewski1 Comment

What if imagination is a decaying sense, only temporarily kept alive like a fading memory
of the letters I once wrote? For instance, the other day I was going through the laundry
and found in the inside pocket of my jacket an old coffee shop bill with a note on the back:
“Your lips have no eyes; my eyes have no lips—we are complementary entities.” I recall
that tingling feeling when we walked with cups, holding hands, unaware it was the last time
in a crowd where no one looked at us, and you liked it that way, regretting only that real life
has no soundtrack. Then, for a while, our hands practised irrelevant gestures to pass the time
between meals and sleeping hours. I know; I never asked why you decided to run into me.
You never asked why I left, either. Perhaps we were always just perfect strangers in disguise,
rehearsing another day of their drama on paper.

pencil sketch of a middle aged man with disheveled hair and beard

The implied wisdom of my age

Published on by Maciej Modzelewski1 Comment

They say that with age comes wisdom. Perhaps, but how can I be certain?
What I do know for sure is that with age comes nocturia, high cholesterol,
and a bad temper, although in fact I was grumpy even before I got older.
Touch wood, I am mobile and keep up with my work. But I have also lost
my inclination to claim the source of all earthly goods that we endlessly
pursue. Because who needs cornucopia in the age of waste-defined plenty,
where even the ever-reinvented trinity of ubertas, veritas, and auctoritas
gravitates towards mockery?

pencil sketch of a hand holding a pocket watch and playing cards on the table

A sleight of hand too late

Published on by Maciej Modzelewski1 Comment

Facing the future, I tend to drift towards the bygone predicament of the here and now,
as if the past were all that should concern me, yet I obsessively control each and every
passing moment as though a pocket watch I stole from my great-grandfather and carry
everywhere could keep them alive for a little longer. Then I wish there was more time,
often when it is too late for a little sleight of hand—the last trionfi card is already dealt.

Nosferatu leans over the woman

Surrogates

Published on by Maciej Modzelewski1 Comment

One never sleeps with a corpse, maybe except for one’s own spouse
after twenty years of trite upheavals in the castle. But what got me there,
one might ask? That always-at-hand cliché of the great loves of my life,
I suppose: Audrey Hepburn, Marcello Mastroianni, Max Schreck—all
as dead as the celluloid that keeps them alive. At least I can still be a little
adventurous from time to time, although each film marathon eventually
becomes nothing more than an inconvenience. Probably like everything
else in life after a while. Perhaps that is why humanity’s greatest torment
is, in fact, boredom. No wonder that one has recently switched to voice
couching. Coital vocalisations are the latest challenge. Maybe unethical,
but how fulfilling! At least for now.

a man crying in the rain

The rain

Published on by Maciej Modzelewski3 Comments

Window-shopping on Sunday afternoon was like adjectives attached to a noun when you say,
“This is beautiful,” so I could respond, “Nonsense, you are beautiful; this is just expensive.”
Then you hummed Come Away with Me, but the last time I touched your toes, they were cold,
and the bus left empty as you never wrote me that song. Only the rain has never let me down.

two surreal figures in mourning leaning towards each other over the cracked earth

In the name of

Published on by Maciej Modzelewski1 Comment

Reduced to a poem, to a world in terms of words, if only read like a distant memory
of the Lost Generation—witnesses of Verdun and the Somme—it can still shake off
the thoughts of cluster bombs and grain tanks hit by missiles in the port of Odessa.
But forced by the bare-chested madman to stop fantasising about the end of history,
the world may face the end of itself, ordered from a secret nuclear bunker in the name
of that same history.

a man in a room full of books stands by the window and reads by the light of the streetlamps

The way we are born

Published on by Maciej Modzelewski1 Comment

I know we always assume that parental love is a given,
but have you ever wondered what it would be like to be
the reason your parents have been at each other’s throats
for as long as you can remember, just because the distance
between their wedding anniversary and your birthday
is oddly close? Personally, I feel like I would rather never
have been born than bear such a burden, but it so happened
that I was, and trust me, it rips every bit of light out of you,
to the point that you lock yourself in a room with books
read by street light, standing behind a curtain. This is how
madmen and poets are born.