substance – radical druid

What You Think It Is

Published on September 4, 2025

It isn’t what you think it is at all.
There is no solid substance underneath.
Just one small push will make the whole thing fall,
and patching it together, to be brief,
is just a pointless exercise, designed
to take you far beyond your breaking point,
and there, when you begin to lose your mind,
to leave you helplessly and fully out of joint.

It’s an illusion: what you think you see
as disconnected one-offs in the void
are neither separate, stand-alone, or free.
They try to be, but quickly get annoyed
with any effort made to reconcile
their make-believe, imagined state of grace,
with a mere safety net meant to beguile
and leave you with a smile upon your face.

This freedom that you seek, and prize so high:
what do you think it means to stand alone
while life and love’s engagements pass you by
and do not leave their numbers in your phone?
You are not an island tossed out in the sea,
a thousand miles from any human touch.
There is no place where you are not with me.
You cannot disengage the world that much.

It isn’t what you want to think. How real
does your imagination make this seem?
Beneath the shadows, will you find some steel,
or only graying remnants of a dream?
That sense of permanence is just a lie
you tell yourself makes substance out of dust,
and gives you satisfaction, by and by,
until like everything, it turns to rust.

04 SEP 2025

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Anybody’s Anything: droighneach

Published on May 20, 2025

Nothing that is temporary becomes infinite;
each thing’s just a project. It starts and it finishes,
simply an effect of a cause, made of composites
that wax and wane. Being comes and then diminishes.

Everything is empty – it is not separated
although it seems to be neatly subdivided.
It is only by illusions it is frustrated;
in that shadow state nothing feels it is united.

Anything that’s trapped in time’s grip stays motionless;
it is not really living, merely an appearance.
A thing grows to another thing, not quite motiveless,
but only what whole contains it maintains coherence.

Something doesn’t come into being from emptiness;
our busy minds create those lines of separation.
While we glorify our own sense of great sentience,
the world is otherwise engaged in all creation.

20 MAY 2025

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What is Love: sestina

Published on May 26, 2017

Is love a thing that lasts, or a mere trinket,
a toy that fascinates until it bores,
a passing fancy, or eternal compact
between two souls and never any more,
a gift from gods above, or social stricture
meant as a mere distraction for the mind?

If only short-term passion or mere pastime,
who was the first poor fool to ever think it?
Imagine, if you can, that sadist’s picture
of all the violence that love held in store.
It’s hard to even fathom a much more
effective way to stymie human contact.

And what divine creator is so lacking
compassion for their children, all mankind,
that our connecting is a frightening chore,
as fragile as a momentary blink?
Who would believe in such gods any more,
that leaven pain in such a heavy mixture?

And yet, if love is an eternal fixture,
there seems about it a confounding lack
of solid substance built in at its core;
it takes so long for even two to find,
yet needs so little work and time to sink it.
How could it last beyond a day or more?

It seems so ill-equipped for what’s in store:
a world that frowns on any cheerful picture,
that trades not in eternity, but trinkets
designed never to bind, but just attract.
Thus all the poets say that love is blind;
what difference, when our eyesight proves so poor?

Does love last once it’s left the showroom floor,
or does it leave its victims far from shore,
where stripped of all illusion, each one finds
what they imagined was a solid mixture
begins to crumble into dust and crack,
and leave them on a sea with naught to drink?

No, love is more than either of these pictures;
you neither score, nor spend time keeping track.
You find eternity in every moment’s wink.

26 MAY 2017

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The Use of Dreams: rondine

Published on May 11, 2017

What is the use of dreams devoid of action,
that linger on as hopes before they die;
and while they last, convince us if we try
that in the end we will find satisfaction.
Such wistful shadows taunt us to distraction;
lost in the mist, we separate in factions
and dissipate and fade out, by and by.
What is the use?

If dreams and hope are to have any traction,
they must inspire our deeds, not just reactions.
We must find rousing songs, not lullabies,
and exercise our wings if we would fly.
If not, life is continuing subtraction;
what is the use?

11 MAY 2017

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Salt of the Earth

Published on July 28, 2006

Imagine a person made completely out of salt.

If that person chooses to be immersed in the ocean, their very being is absorbed by the sea. Once their head is beneath the waves, no distinction can be made between their now dissolved form and the depths into which they have sojourned. Not even the ocean can separate itself again, saying “this minute portion of me is of that small salt doll, and the remainder is not”.

Such is the case, too, when a person approaches and begins to comprehend the infinite energy of the universe. Once an individual recognizes the eternal within themselves, the external sack of temporal cloth in which that eternal has been stored melts away, and only the infinite remains.

In either case, who is left to report, to return some answer to the question they originally set out seeking? And in what language could that answer be expressed, that those on the shore, whose toes scarcely dare to dip into the surf’s foam, would be able to understand?

Even the cleverest of parables fails. And to speak with the voice of the ocean itself is to be misunderstood as a overwhelming roar.

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How Many Times?

Published on March 5, 2006

for Johnny Cash

How many times must I repeat
the same old tired line?
How many times can this old heart
be broken and be fine?
It doesn’t take a genius to opine
the odds are bound to take a sharp decline.

How many times must substance
take a backseat behind style?
How many times can a good man
walk down that extra mile?
The calculations need not take a while;
no need to note an entry in some file.

It doesn’t mean that I don’t love you,
but I’m getting tired
of waking up each morning
feeling old and uninspired;
There’s just an empty feeling
in my heart that’s like a hole,
and a longing for something that’s
out of my control.

How many words should be too many
spoken out of turn?
How many matches must we strike
before we start to burn?
It doesn’t take a brilliant man to learn
the law about diminishing returns.

How many lies will we both tell
before we face the truth?
How much of careless, foolish love
is wasted in our youth?
It doesn’t take too much to find the proof
that some foundation must hold up the roof.

05 MAR 2006

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Not Much of Everything

Published on October 18, 2005

What is belief except a means to reach
beyond the limits safe within our grasp
to learn from the unknown what it may teach?
If in that fertile darkness, courage fails,
as well as our illusions of defense,
what is there but belief until night pales?

Can faith alone provide, as some suppose,
sufficient armor against what we fear:
a deep pervading loneliness that grows
with every hour, behind our cheerful smiles;
a nagging doubt that we are each alone;
that substance fails, and there are merely styles?

It is belief that is our mooring rock:
the tenets that we hold as true and sure,
that mark us individuals, and shock
those who either grasp at fashion’s whims,
or sip from here or there, like butterflies;
the book of life we choose to read, not skim.

But separate belief from life, and it becomes
a rigid set of chains that bind the soul,
that does not fuel, but instead starts to numb
the senses to the underlying truth:
that what we see is only a small part,
akin to how old age is known to youth:

A lantern in the dark, but not the light;
a drop of canteen water, not the spring;
a packet of dry crackers, but not grain;
a piece, not very much, of everything.

18 OCT 2005

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Tag: substance

What You Think It Is

Anybody’s Anything: droighneach

What is Love: sestina

The Use of Dreams: rondine

Salt of the Earth

How Many Times?

Not Much of Everything