Tag: nostalgia

The tangential

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Caught in ungraceful ageing,
like the past imperfect
clinging to a collection of grainy photographs,
Mr Honk felt tangential
every time he was greeted by a neighbour
with the unfamiliar ‘Ay ay, fit like?’
or ‘Foos yer doos?’,
unable to muster the expected
‘Nae bad, chavin’ awa’ in response,
not because of the vernacular barrier
but for the simple fact that he’d answer the hum
of a foghorn or oystercatcher’s cry
rather than admitting that he longed for a touch
of unadulterated soma.

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Midnight

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‘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.

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*** [No one writes anymore]

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No one writes anymore
to Poste Restante
that the billowing gloom
of fluff and puff
says more about longing
than the pristine sky—
unfortunately relaxing—
like when a handful of pages
proves more than a thousand,
whether one follows Norval
or his father on the Grampian Hills.

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Perpetuum mobile

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I can’t remember if I ever wanted to say something in particular, if my words had any intended purpose, at least not since the very beginning, when the first verse coincided with the end of puberty and was meant to impress a girl. It did not. I wonder what she’d say now—not that it would matter, and her face has been lost to the mists of time anyway. Perhaps that’s what always drew me to what Socrates said about poets in the ‘Apology’. At least, after more than three decades, my writing—although not a perpetuum mobile—is as close to self-perpetuating as one gets.

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Conversations

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I find reading The Letters of Lytton Strachey a great deal of pleasure, and yet it is like listening to a telephone conversation where all you can hear is the man standing in front of you with the receiver in his hand. For that reason, I look back on reading the correspondence between Stanisław Lem and Sławomir Mrożek with all the more nostalgia. It has been a solid ten years since I last held this voluminous tome in my hands. Perhaps it’s time to return once again to their wit and wisdom.

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The childhood gaieties

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There is nothing like father-son bonding
over car washing on Saturday afternoon—
even if rendered futile by the torrential rain—
on the long list of childhood gaieties we’ll try
to forget for the rest of our lives.

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Sunday

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I like the sun in full bloom
to have a cloud cover
with only occasional breaks,
as it is less intimidating that way—
at least on Sundays.

I probably should have gone
to the beach
like I used to,
but I spent the late morning in an armchair
by the window,
reading
and snacking on almonds instead,
and now I’m playing
with a word processor.

Why is it that I’d rather write a verse
than live it?

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I must have lost something

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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.

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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.

More words to ponder at maciejmodzelewski.com