Tag Archives: perception

What We Pretend: cyhydedd hir

What is life, unless
it seeks happiness
and the sweet caress
of contentment?

What good is one’s strain
in harness, kept chained?
Is what we each gain
self-evident?

What else is out there
past temporal cares,
waiting unaware
our finding?

How long will it wait,
our ebullient fate?
Will its revealed state
be blinding?

Just how will we know,
in that diffuse glow,
the truth and what’s so
from lying?

Suppose in the end,
that all life depends
on what we pretend
is dying?

15 FEB 2017

Share This:

The shadow knows

It ought to be a simple thing:
you spend years looking for just what
inspires you, makes you realize
exactly how to become you,
to finally be satisfied
with who the mirror shows you back,
and make the bold choice to refuse
your past to close you in.

It ought to be a simple thing;
and yet, once that thing is achieved,
and all the hours and pointless days
up to that point are washed away,
the wounds from battles long forgot
all healed, their scars in slow retreat,
a shadow still remains behind
and finds you unaware.

It ought to be a simple thing:
a shoulder’s shrug should send it off,
that careless smile you’ve learned to wear
to keep your thoughts close to the vest,
and yet, despite a new-found strength
spurred by convictions now secured,
the darkness creeps in with the night
to hide you from yourself.

28 APR 2013

Share This:

A Screen Door of Perception: a cywydd llosgyrnog

Perspective can be a strange thing.
Much like a worm on a string
or wind that sings through the trees,
it twists and turns this way and that
and doesn’t settle or grow fat,
standing pat or as you please.

Don’t try to grasp a hold of it;
you’ll be convinced to up and quit.
You may as well knit warm steam
or reconcile the night and day.
Besides, the tricks the light will play
at their best may be just dreams.

To see a thing for what it is!
To somehow think this some great bliss,
you sadly miss the whole view.
Without the real horizon line
that demarcates yours and mine,
how will you find what is true?

11 DEC 2012

Share This:

The View You Choose

Having just seen the new Harry Potter film, I was contemplating the underlying message I find in JK Rowling’s work. No, it’s not some dark Satanic point that seeks to overthrow the basic power structure of the Christo-centric universe. Not exactly, anyway. In my opinion, the most important lesson to be learned from Harry Potter is this: there are people in this world who see magic, and those who don’t. Much like there are people that imagine the world is becoming a hell-hole, and those who imagine it can become a paradise. It doesn’t matter, really, from whence you feel that the magic, or power, emanates. What does matter is your motivation for harnessing it. Next to that, is your interest in how it affects other people. Or something like that.

Among the views with which to judge this life
are found just variations of a pair:
the one, that looks upon the world as filled with strife
and seeks for naught beyond its veiled despair,

with tired and jaded judgments placing blame
on circumstance and temporary might;
for those who look in this way, life’s a game
that designates the one who wins as right.

And sadly, with this vision they proceed
to deem imagination foolishness;
Upon the world they let their bitterness exceed
their hope, and thus, destroy real happiness.

Some unseen, greater prize in vain they seek
to line the coffers of their empty hearts;
and without joy, at length, they deign to speak
of where one’s duty ends, and knowledge starts.

The other view sees the same time and place,
but seeks beyond the surface of the world
and to its mad illusions gives no chase
preferring the whole oyster to the pearl.

Where others see mere folly and lost wealth
attending those who linger on the path,
concerned with more than benefit to self,
they look upon the flower’s bloom, and laugh.

In each small thing, a sense of grand design
and purpose is observed by eyes like these;
and in the commonplace, they seek and find
beneath the surface, subtle energies

that form the substance of all that exists;
yet this discovery breeds no sense of pride,
nor puts their name on some great hidden list;
’tis rarely fame and wisdom coincide.

Of course, within each group, a varied lot
that spans the gamut from glutton to saint,
exists, and each must find their chosen spot.
For some the vision’s strong, for others, faint.

But it is from this pair of points of view
that all the world divides in sects and creeds:
the one, that sees no magic left to do;
the other, knowing better, disagrees.

06 JUN 2004

Share This:

Dreams and Light

Each day I wake, my head crammed full of dreams
that reach into my conscious life unasked,
defining how I perceive each new task
by tearing at reality’s worn seams.

From dawn to dusk they push and pull my mind
in strange directions, seeking some release;
new tangents form in patterns without cease
and with their ebb and flow, seek to design

the life that I too often see as dull,
its colors faded out to browns and grays,
mere repetitions of some useless rite.

Of moments too soon gone, my life is full;
and on these fleeting chimeras, my days
oft lose their edges and fade into light.

02 JUN 2004

Share This:

Able Was I Ere I Saw Elba

Some things exist to turn perceptions inside out;
their presence tends to shift and rend to shreds the veils
and introduce, in even the most stable minds, some doubt —
by subtlety reminding pristine saints of crucifixion’s nails.

Despite all valiant efforts to resist the twist of time
that folds and spindles all the distance one has come,
in just a moment’s span the truth becomes much less sublime,
and the most eloquent tongues are left wordless and dumb;

while back in chasms of the tortured past
the mind is thrown like Christians to the raving beasts.
In just a fateful second the losing die is cast,
making the future, risked, become the very least

of measures to describe the scope of hope and life;
and in those frenzied fragments, when belief
has turned against the back of faith its traitor’s knife,
its mad aggression finding no escape route or relief,

the helplessness of childhood sinks upon the soul
and one is left to wonder how, at almost forty years,
the palimpsest illusion built up of great self-control
can vanish in a few seconds leaving only bitter tears.

From some things that wear old familiar masks
an energy of entropy and chaos seems to engulf and drown;
seeking to remind us as we struggle at life’s tasks
that to see us as we used to be, some will want to bring us down.

14 MAY 2004

“As Elba taught Napoleon, all men ARE islands; some are just in better climates.” — John Litzenberg, from The Secret Undertown Ministry

Share This:

Seed Thought for the Day

The truth is that a man’s sense of the world dictates his subjects to him and that this sense is derived from his personality, his temperament, over which he has little control and possibly none, except superficially. It is not a literary problem. It is the problem of his mind and nerves. These sayings are another form of the saying that poets are born not made. A poet writes of twilight because he shrinks from noon-day. He writes about the country because he dislikes the city, and he likes the one and dislikes the other because of some trait of mind or nerves; that is to say, because of something in himself that influences his thinking and feeling. So seen, the poet and his subject are inseparable. There are stresses that he invites; there are stresses that he avoids. There are colors that have the blandest effect on him; there are others with which he can do nothing but find fault. In Music he likes the strings. But the horn shocks him. A flat landscape extending in all directions to immense distances placates him. But he shrugs his shoulders at mountains.

— Wallace Stevens, from Effects of Analogy (1948), The Necessary Angel

If, as Stevens proposes, a poet’s subject is congenital, that leads me to wonder about my own. While he states, earlier in the above-referenced essay, that “great numbers of poets come and go who have never had a subject at all,” I cannot see myself in that group. Perhaps after reading Foster’s biography of Yeats, I realized that I was not such a diletante, or rather a scatterbrain, at all, when it came to artistic endeavor. To be a playwright, poet, Musician, lyricist, essayist, polemicist, all in one frame-of-reference, is an achievable thing. And yet, I found in myself as compared to Yeats two things missing: one, an unerring belief in my own greatness; and two, the tenacity for self-publicizing that would drive me to have my voice heard, first, and heard in an environment that I created and/or controlled, second.

All that aside, I wonder on what my congenitally designated “poetic subject” might be. Or what, when I can avail myself of the ivory tower of solitary meditation and creative focus, is it that draws my thoughts in such a way that it is impossible NOT to write about them, or in some artistic manner, express my acknowledgment of it.

Looking back on the Poetry I’ve written in the past two years (probably my most consistently fruitful period in a single medium), I encounter a certain repetition of thematic elements: sound, silence, space, Music, balance and and underlying system of energy that runs through all that exists. But that seems too broad a spectrum of thought – and how it relates to the life I live, is questionable, although I can see how these things affect me, it is difficult to determine what exactly these concepts outline in my reality.

Share This: