I had a wife once;
such an unfortunate slip of judgement,
or perhaps a twist of fate,
since the final years—
not as verbose, but ripe—
have made me a poet
I’ve never been before.
I imagine that’s the feeling
of a butcher on the opening night
of the Delicatessen.
More words to ponder at maciejmodzelewski.com
My object-free life
sometimes needs something more
tangible yet obtuse, so it wouldn’t hurt
when it touches the fettle
that comes with a myriad of attempts,
like all that prying used to:
‘Where are you off to?’
I guess I still need time.
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
[…] the point of disagreement is not that I like his body better than he likes mine, but that he likes my mind less than I like his.
Lytton Strachey, from a letter to Leonard Woolf
I don’t believe in unicorns
and beautiful boys entering the picture mid-spring
to redeem love—
or whatever that spree in meadowland is called—
only to turn yet another string of random labels
that our days need to progress
from one misstep to the next.
Besides, I’m not well-adjusted—I wish I were,
or perhaps not; maybe it’s better the way I am—
unlike all the pre-highbrows walking down Charing Cross Road
on rainy Sundays; I’m still struggling with the difference
between pleasing you and joining your tribe.
More words to ponder at maciejmodzelewski.com
When does a tourist become a burgher,
and for a pedantic, yet unassuming gentleman
like myself, would it be an insurmountable transition?
After all, when I walk down Back Wynd,
no one can guess one way or the other,
and two decades in Granite City have instilled in me
a certain taste for grey, whether it be walls
or headstones.
As a kid, did you ever dream of creating something
unwittingly complicated, like the theory of everything
or a box of matches to light the stake, or practical—
another Antikythera mechanism, for instance—
only to realise years later that no one expected you to
because apparently, nothing beats the nine-to-five
on the way to the golden age? And they may be right,
but you know what? At least you won’t be crying
over pyrite.
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.
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.
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?
hidden pilcrow 