How can I remember my future
when my past has been gravely misspelt—
with all the hasty gerunds
and coarse-grained adjectives
serving no purpose
other than ornament—
and even rain has lost its subsumption
in such an unconceivable milieu,
so that when I entertain the idea
of using the vested Pooterish umbrella,
I always have to consider the wistfulness
of the draught?
More words to ponder at maciejmodzelewski.com
‘There is something about adjectives
that makes one feel rather peckish’
was an opening line for a casual conversation
whose consequences, like death by misadventure
as a raree-show, lay between two words,
whispered at midnight with Nina Simone,
when you weren’t sure
if you were greeting a new day
or mourning the past one.
More words to ponder at maciejmodzelewski.com
Whether it’s young, in dire need of leniency,
or old enough to be forgiven or forgotten,
it’s not life that is alluring; it’s the photographs
that we take of it.
More words to ponder at maciejmodzelewski.com
What was the last thing you remember
before you died? I was signing my book,
but I can’t recall if it was as MacCallus
or Modzelewski. It doesn’t matter—
they’re both equally ridiculous—
just like signing a book
I never published.
More words to ponder at maciejmodzelewski.com
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.
More words to ponder at maciejmodzelewski.com
Some remember Turkey for the Ottoman Empire;
others for Recep Tayyip Erdoğan,
the imprisonment, torture and enforced disappearances of Kurds,
the invasion of Cyprus,
the drone strikes on the Tishrin Dam,
and the list just goes on and on.
But I will remember Turkey for the dried apricots
with sulphur dioxide that poisoned me.
More words to ponder at maciejmodzelewski.com
Looking at the old ray diagrams of a telescope
reminded me of the one I once bought
as a birthday present for someone
but missed the opportunity to give to them,
and now it sits under my desk—
like the Kilbrittain Whale—
next to the document shredder, collecting dust
and the occasional pang of guilt,
just like all the languages I’ve ever learnt,
or rather tried to, only to end up skimming a tad of Polish
and later getting a smattering of English—
one being my mother tongue, the other transplanted—
and in the end, settling for memorising full names,
like T.S. Eliot’s and GLS’s, but even that didn’t go too well
with my memory wrinkling along with my physiognomy.
Sometimes I return to the books of my youth.
They are the same and yet not quite,
partly because I read them in a different language then,
but also I have long since parted ways
with that whippersnapper.
Let life insist on being lived—not out of solidarity, of course, but as a reminder of the youth
you once held dear, like any other souvenir that has temporarily come into your possession,
except, perhaps, for acne or all the juvenile plumage you resented for so long back then
and now quietly pretend it was actually inconsequential—in fact, it never really happened,
you tell yourself—which, even though it’s an acquired habit, has become second nature to you,
just like the fear that one day you will wake up in the middle of the night and simply forget
to be afraid.
hidden pilcrow 