With a nameplate on his door
and a stanza in his wallet,
Mr Honk stumbled upon
the first smidgeon of perpetuity,
but as a newborn he looked back
at the five decades of his life
with a hint of reservation—
fate might have spared him
the habitual thumb-munching
but not the descriptive grammar:
You ain’t lived nothing yet!
More words to ponder at maciejmodzelewski.com
They say that people won’t know how you feel
unless you tell them, yet it’s difficult to expect understanding
from those who dream of immortality—
where opulent octogenarians become the new youth,
leaving fingerprints in the linguist’s garden—
while all you’re looking forward to is for someone to tell you
what it means to be a proper grown-up.
Why is there me rather than not,
as if the slipper animalcule were not enough,
even if only recalled from the bygone, coarse syllogisms
of my birthplace, to allude to an obscure pen warrior,
known perhaps to a few highbrows in the Slavic literature department here and there?
Obscurity is actually what everyone should aim for, by the way.
But that’s just me, I guess. After all, fame seems to be the currency
that buys the much-desired immortality
of tomorrow’s bog roll.
We didn’t invent death,
but we managed to industrialise it;
neither did we invent life,
and yet we pursue an obsession with immortality,
slowly losing the ability to distinguish silence
from the absence of sound.
To think, it all started with sin—our only invention.
It all starts with a word or a phrase that turns into a paragraph,
and only then is it divided into verses and stanzas, if needed.
At least, that is my approach to writing a poem. The particulars
for sure vary from one author to another, but the whole process
has one thing in common: it is a trial-and-error-ridden fight
for immortality—pointless if you ask me, although I still take
part in this rite anyway, mostly in the hope of a breakfast
at Tiffany’s.
hidden pilcrow 