Tag: existential crisis

The blind eat many a fly

Published on by Maciej Modzelewski2 Comments

My name is Peeping Tom—
caught in the little drama
of that insular open-air museum
unwilling to admit it punches above its weight,
I can’t imagine calling myself anything else
after a few weeks of reading The Letters
of Lytton Strachey—and yet even a subaltern
yearns to be fond of something
beyond the mathematics of conduct,
where to simply live would be nothing
but stating the obvious (we try to warm ourselves
by the soul’s residual heat, only such a fireplace is no more—
we once replaced it with a radiator).
But if life has no inherent meaning,
it’s up to me to invent one for myself—
a cup of chilled hemlockshake should suffice.

More words to ponder at maciejmodzelewski.com

Envy

Published on by Maciej ModzelewskiLeave a comment

I have always been—and still am—convinced that life is an unnecessary hassle to which we are subjected without our explicit consent. But since I dread it so much, one might say that simply ending it seems like a viable solution. The thing is, that would require either a great deal of knowledge or determination—neither of which I have—which shows just how much effort both nature and my fellow inmates put into keeping me in this panopticon. Oh, how I envy the paramecium or, better yet, a pebble on a riverbed.

More words to ponder at maciejmodzelewski.com

The myth of sonnets

Published on by Maciej ModzelewskiLeave a comment

Perhaps the sum of my anticipations has always been destined
to end in a dethronement of reason, even though I was meant to be anything
but a human body—a mere bagful of petards, subject to daily routines
and mundane sustenance practices—only to be born
without the indiscriminate approval of life
that is required to live one’s own fussy eulogy to the fullest,
or at all. Is that why they taught me Shakespeare
rather than Schopenhauer?

A bitter muffin topped with a golden birthday wish

Published on by Maciej ModzelewskiLeave a comment

Life is a curse—a sentient one all the more so—yet we cling tenaciously
to this self-perpetuating whim of fate, failing to see that we are nothing
but victims of Stockholm syndrome in a vicious circle of reproduction,
with the upshot of comatose reason as a fig leaf for weaponised intimacy;
nothing that an episode of hentai and a box of tissues wouldn’t have solved.
If only I had known this all those years ago, or better yet, if I had never
been born to have to learn it.

January

Published on by Maciej ModzelewskiLeave a comment

Life is a no-win situation,
at least when, wrapped in a blanket, wearing two cardigans, I fight
the cold and my own words.

At first, I didn’t mean the inevitability of death
(mortality is actually a silver lining so few can appreciate),
but our innate, boredom-inducing insatiability—the mother of all vices,
or at least many of them.

But then the Irishman said, ‘Something will be mine wherever I am,’
and it struck me that after all these years and places,
one thing has never left me—my guilt.

Red ants on a strip

Published on by Maciej ModzelewskiLeave a comment

When I was a boy, a drawing of red ants
walking along a Möbius strip caught my eye.
I thought their lives must be pretty boring
(not that mine had ever come close to even a clumsily sketched tesseract),
but I never imagined I could envy them, and yet here I was,
faced with the alternative—relentless pestering:
Get out; find someone; live a little!

Hell truly is paved with good intentions.