Tag: poem

watercolour of a man in a suit and fedora

What name do you wear to dinner?

Published on by Maciej Modzelewski1 Comment

I never liked my name. It sounds wishy-washy, to be honest,
and definitely lacks the solid attitude of Piotr or Janusz.
Even my middle name has more to offer in this regard.
And why do we attach so much importance to the name
in the first place? What’s wrong with changing it like we do
with our hair or clothes? Our bodies, not to mention minds,
also change over time, so why stick with the same name for life?
Maybe tomorrow I will wake up feeling like Aditya or Haruto,
or better yet, Gwendolyn, to express my feminine side.
And why limit ourselves to calendar pages? Don’t we change
out of our morning sweatpants into work clothes, and after
returning home, into something more appropriate for dinner,
finally slipping into our pyjamas at the end of the day?
And if a name is indeed at the core of our personality,
then building it on a foundation that is merely the accidental
whim of our parents on our birthday seems somewhat unwise.
Anyway, right now, I feel like nobody—Mr. Nobody.

watercolour with a clock, notes, a cup of tea and a cookie on the table

In the hour of my death

Published on by Maciej Modzelewski4 Comments

In the hour of my death, I did something insignificant,
as I often would. A book fell to the floor, bending the pages,
which I never liked. A stillborn note cut off mid-sentence
never got a chance to become a stanza. A cup of tea gone cold
and a half-eaten cookie—not even a madeleine—that at best
could remind someone of my cholesterol problems were waiting
to be thrown away. Only the clock, as always, marked the passing
moments with its regular tick-tock. In the hour of my death,
I did something insignificant because, in the end, I was taken
by surprise again.

watercolour with a tiny human figure lost in the void of space

Imagining nothing

Published on by Maciej Modzelewski1 Comment

Sometimes I write words. Most of the time, I write
nothing, and I know it’s just the way English grammar works,
but still, that substantiation of nothingness is truly baffling.
And I’m not talking about vacuum, which, by the way,
is no longer equated with nothing in modern science;
not even about être-pour-soi, the nihilation of être-en-soi,
but about the true nothingness—the unimaginable.

watercolour portrait of a bored young woman

Actively bored

Published on by Maciej Modzelewski1 Comment

You will never see the peculiarities
of your own language
or really appreciate its beauty
until you learn another one.

Only after emigrating,
while delving into the intricacies of English,
did I notice that in my mother tongue
there is a construction that is contrary
to the principles of logic.

The negative concord was quite a surprise,
and once I saw it, I was baffled at
how something so obvious
had escaped my notice
for almost three decades.

On the other hand, if I think of diminutives,
English is not even remotely close
to what one can achieve in Polish.

And if the doldrums struck,
in my native language, you could say I’m bored
but also express that in a more active,
if untranslatable, form.

stack of letters of the Latin alphabet

Let’s say—future

Published on by Maciej Modzelewski1 Comment

Imagine a simple word—let’s say—future, spoken as if it were native
to my mother tongue. It would sound something akin to foo-too-re,
with the last e pronounced as in the verb get. It sounds rather ridiculous,
doesn’t it? Perhaps this will allow you to be in my shoes for a moment,
so you know my feelings when I hear you say my name like it’s English.
It may be hard to believe, but the letters of the most widely used script,
the Latin alphabet, do not necessarily represent the same sounds
as in the current lingua franca.

young woman lying among scraps of paper with notes

Time does not need a notebook

Published on by Maciej Modzelewski1 Comment

My notes are full of random phrases,
thoughts cut off mid-sentence,
now devoid of context,
phone numbers that no longer matter,
and hard-to-decipher scribbles
that were probably meant to represent something.
Quite a patchwork, needless to say,
but still the best capture
of my dishevelled life at hand.
And to add an extra splash of colour to it,
I don’t even have a proper notebook;
it’s all on scraps of paper,
on the backs of receipts and tickets
that pile up in an old Christmas basket,
with time playing Secret Santa.

watercolour with a person leaving the bedroom

The connoisseur

Published on by Maciej Modzelewski1 Comment

It takes a while to finish all the morning routines
before opening the curtains, which inevitably marks
the beginning of a new day, but once you accept
that waking up hurts, you can always find some solace
in the opening 4’33”, and then all you have to do
is pass through the bedroom door for another barefoot
pilgrimage to the shoe rack full of pairs of Louis Vuitton,
as genuine as Vermeer’s The Supper at Emmaus,
your favourite.

watercolour with a man paying with a credit card

The lost caress of dosh

Published on by Maciej Modzelewski1 Comment

Practicality aside, there is a certain beauty to the old imperial coinage.
All those sovereigns and crowns and their halves, guineas, shillings,
and farthings—not to mention bobs, coppers, or tanners—are pure poetry
marked with the royal physiognomy. And while I appreciate the ease
of counting money after decimalisation, I still have a feeling something was lost
in the process—even more so once a quid became nothing but a virtual row
of zeros and ones spent with one careless swipe of a piece of plastic.

watercolour of a couple listening to a turntable

The last waltz

Published on by Maciej Modzelewski2 Comments

Waking up to Tom Traubert’s Blues
was never meant to be anything more
than a provisional unction
plastered over my troubled little I,
but with each hoarse waltz with Matilda,
my fingers became addicted
to the gentle brushing of the piano keys.

When I played it for you that morning,
you compared it to a glass of Chardonnay;
for me, it has always been more
like the rich savour of sun-dried tomatoes
bathed in sunflower oil,
but when you laughed in amusement at this,
the turntable stopped mid-word,

or perhaps it was us no longer present,
already honing the past.