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
Whether it’s a fountain
in the land of the Macrobians,
the Pool of Bethesda, mind uploading
or an occasional botox injection,
it’s hard to shake the feeling
that the eternal youth of our dreams
borders somewhat on everlasting
infancy.
More words to ponder at maciejmodzelewski.com
He’s most a runner who has won the race.
The Category, Lytton Strachey
It’s supposed to be May, yet with two degrees outside
and fifteen in my study, it feels like December. But who cares
about mismatched months when the years are also mixed up—
for now I’m stuck in nineteen-oh-five, mostly because it’s hard to be a person
when you’re reduced to a book of letters with a somewhat blurry picture
that was never intended for a cover.
More words to ponder at maciejmodzelewski.com
I was never in a hurry to learn how to play an old man—heck, being a responsible adult
was already a challenge—because I always had plenty of time to do so, or so I thought,
until the day I woke up and realised with horror that the scarecrow was already on the horizon.
I wonder if that’s why they call it the golden birthday, except I have a sneaking suspicion
it’ll turn out to be made of pyrite.
Time flies when you’re having fun, or so they say,
but to be honest, I can’t really call my life fun-filled,
yet five decades have flown by in the blink of an eye
without me even noticing, and now I’m staring
at a white-bearded face looking back from the mirror
and wondering what was the point in laughing
at that kid who thought fifty years was a long time
when I probably have twenty or thirty more to go
and can’t even imagine making it through a week
of family Christmas gatherings.
A clock can’t outlive time—at best, it can tell
that your autumn holidays are an hour longer
after you’ve decided you’re just an unassuming tourist
wandering the soggy back alleys full of perplexing words
in search of the greatest passage—but as it breaks,
you notice it’s not just its hands that stop.
A day never lasts past midnight,
and sure, you can always say a new one has just arrived,
but what if the previous one didn’t have a chance to toll its end,
neither moving forward nor melting away like a stuck celluloid frame,
and—though you might have bid it farewell by closing the curtains,
expecting nothing but a clean slate, even if a few occasional scratches
marked the coming morning—it turned into a galling tinnitus
amidst the cries of a peacock? Would you rather ignore it
or reveal its unseemly secrets?
What is the future, if not an incoming bygone,
or the present, if not an ongoing hereafter,
or the past, if not the nonce—just erstwhile?
When you think about it, our perception of time
is no better than of the squawking of a magpie.
No wonder we populate scrapbooks with eidola,
as if every departure comes in an untimely fashion.
Time measured by worn shirt collars and holes in socks,
or by glyphs drawn haphazardly by seagulls on windows
to be washed away by rain eventually, or by the varying
intensity and amplitude of pain in an arm—is it truly all
but nothing? After all, if I learned anything over time,
it was to appreciate a piece of home-made flatbread
with Moroccan-style hummus and black or green olives,
spiced with Sir Roger’s complaints about nightingales
and strumpets at Spring Garden.
hidden pilcrow 