Truth

Should I give them up

my pockmarked truths?

(Each scar-shamed one.)

 

Are they deemed
too blunt and ugly, now?

(Although hard-won.)

 

As if unearthed
dirt-bound

like postholes under
abandoned ancient sites

which only speak
to us
in ash.

 

In charcoal’s black.

From lives undone.

By sufferings
that came on fast.

Remorselessly
unjust.

 

And where

(however much
its victims strove
at staying strong)

Fate’s sharpened heel
then ground things down.

Unto this
trace.

Unnamed.
Unhallowed.

Charred
across deep soil.

 

So to ask

(today)

Do I tell them still:
these damnably
unwelcome truths?

 

Or let what I know
be taken

cancelled

snatched
by
(that thieving death’s-hand)
time?

Or silenced
via law
and dogmas?

 

Either way

(it feels)

I shall
finish

lost.

 

Burning

in censored

exile.

 

 

Or

forgot.

 

 

 

 

---

 

 

 

 

 

(Post-poem musing)

 

 

 

Defeat code

 

 

 

Lies may be popular
yet still pollute the soul.

I’ve seen them spread.

Of course, I speak as mere outsider.
Reject.

Society had no place for me.

Love proved unobtainable.
Friendship unavailable.
Beauty unattainable.
Recognition unachievable.
Conformity unendurable.

But in this desert I sought Truth.
Among a myriad books.

Thinking til my brain hurt.
Bearing painful disillusion.

Served Truth as a mistress.
(Though she was cruel.)

 

Now I fear loss of legacy.
Taking secrets to the grave.

Dread a smothering control-grid
where free thought may barely breathe.

And dissent can get deleted
before even being read.

 

Anxious tyranny goes masked
conceals its mean grimace.

Behind sugar coated rhetoric
of “safety”, “care”, “community”.

Whose guidelines filter
disliked views.

And keep things hid
not argued with.

 

So perhaps my words
will all be wasted?

And hence bullies win again.
(I found they often did.)

Feeling need to speak in code
already signals one’s defeat.

 

What remains is fretting.
Muted impotence.

Watching
washed-up
on the sidelines

While a smug parade
struts by.

To hear its well-lit
noisy victory

sound

that triumph

 

of

the lie.

 

 

 

 

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Belated Birthday Piece

 

The photo below is as close as I ever got to a wedding…

(That’s me, with the top hat.
And a girl even held my hand!
I always loved women’s company.
Hoped one might marry me.

But fate had other plans.)

 

 

 

 

I intended a post marking my 30th consecutive birthday isolated and ill.
(After living alone from 1991.)

Although too unwell for publishing this on time, I am pushing back against oblivion:
by including it, now.

(Please forgive the lateness.)

 

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Nothingness

 

 

In a futile imitation of self-love
I’d vowed:

To mark each birthday
by a piece.

Though the date meant less
it still held worth for me.

Yet I sank too low
this year.

Hence failed (alas).
At feigning some significance.

Depression crushed my spirit
like a bug.

 

I lost a fight
which lostness won.

Then sensed a darkening destiny
a long-imagined fear.

Of joining those forgotten ones.
Who die unseen.

Who lie alone in quiet homes.
Unmissed for months.

As all around go rushing on
compulsive in their busyness.

 

And while I watch 
such fate approach

to change is growing harder
since

it does not just depend on me
but strangers.

As old age reveals
diminished status

shrink toward a nullity
beyond humane regard.

Where no other life
encountered

makes spare any space
for mine.

 

Thus I sit, again
with silence.

Only mapping out
these margins

In my
nothingness.

 

 

 

 

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Wait ages for a poem, then three come along at once! 😀

 

(I wonder which one works best?

Did any lines stand out for you?)

Art on the blog is mine: I hope you like it?  🌛

 

Comments are always VERY welcome! 🙏

 

 

 

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I apologise for blogging infrequently in 2021.

Was going to write about the reasons.
Yet this post seems rather long, already.
(Worry you may get too bored.)
Therefore I’ll leave that topic for another time.

 

I want to finish by expressing my gratitude.
To readers and followers.

As a person absent from other platforms or social media
it has been a moving experience:
exposing my work online, for the first time, here.

Finding people so supportive and kind.

Your likes, follows, and comments, help keep me going.
Maintaining morale during chronic illness.
Countering those temptations to give up. 

 

Would really love to thank you all in person. 🤗

But must make do with sending

 

Best Wishes!

And

Thanks
for reading!

 

 

 

 

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(  art / blog / blogging / depression / drawing / life / mental health / photography /poem / poetry / thoughts / truth / writing)

 

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Quiet force

 

 

 

Lostness   (88)

 

 

Beliefs are like a gravity
which shapes our thinking space.

 

Once taught a thing was moral
one felt better doing it.

So is habit truly ethical
or good taste just preferred bias?

 

Suppose ideas could rank along
a gradient of credulity
according to extreme content
and how much theory each require.

Atheists should have few demands
for doctrine
taking lives to be as
mundane as they seem.

 

While an attribution spiral
might account for certain myths
where nature’s motions
given agency
were reified with spirit.

 

Later, lauding openness
hints at virtue
in naivety.

Suggestions all
“create their own reality”: perhaps abused
by those who seek
to dull the pain
compassion spikes
observing others suffering.

Dismissal shields a
greater guilt

(hence some
scorning “love’s illusion”
on exclusion from such realms).

 

Truths abandoned
soon clear ways for
more self-serving
types of faith.

Though still our
charitable lies
maintain the gift
to blunt a crueller
honesty.

 

 

But

these thoughts got interrupted

as a slight
yet fragrant breeze
through my open window
blew
new smells
resembling freshly laundered
air.

 

 

And thus I caught
its first faint sign

 

that quiet force

 

of spring.

 

 

 

(2006)

 

 

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(Any art on the blog is mine. I hope you like it.
Comments are very welcome!)

 

 

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(art/ beauty/ blog/ drawing/ faith/ ideas/ lostness/ love/ mental health/ poem/ poetry/ thoughts/ truth)

Bright improbability

 

 

 

Lostness   (45)

 

It helps to begin by wanting something.

Why strive, with nothing to strive toward?

 

Existence might be easier in a system that made provision for those wishing to live outside it.

 

I remember questions from a career advisor to our class at school. And noticed few others found difficulty responding…

“What do you want to be?”

I hoped adulthood would see an answer emerge.
But it never has.

“What do you want to do with your life?”

There was an idea of “finding who I am”, before returning to visual art.
Though I failed to find who I was.
Or the way back to art.

 

Should I have masked disappointment in fake smiles,
tried to keep too busy for worrying about my soul…
and any capacity to believe I still had one?

 

Perhaps needing love is a design flaw:
without which I could even feel free
in my isolation?

 

Biology triumphs over truth.
Intellect may want an end;
while body says “no”.

Its basic component, the cell, also names a place of confinement.

 

---

 

 

My mind wandered, next,
through dreams of textual beauty
where polished sentences
shine
in bright improbability.

Hence frustrating attempts
at cleaning previous lines
made soon to realise
how words
are no mirror.

 

 

 

(April 1989)

(philosophy/psychology/mental health/thoughts/writing/poetry)

 

 

 

 

 

 

Paranoid virtue

Lostness   (39)

 

People who condemn power are rarely referring to their own.

 

If power corrupts: how would deities avoid corruption?

Even urges for truth and justice have led to evil, as well as good.

Idealisation of the oppressed might permit excess.

Identity itself becomes divisive.

 

Extremism grants paranoia the status of a virtue.

Intolerance within belief can make it toxic to its own culture.

 

Desire for authority is sometimes matched by our resentment toward it.

Whether externally based, in law; or internal, via morality.

Where divine images carry influences from parental example: a victim of childhood abuse could find them tainted by negativity.

Inner harshness perpetuates punishment.
Addiction to suffering: rather than relief.
Obedience approaching some quality of sin?

 

Being able to forgive anyone except oneself is also an injustice.

Do we feed faith with alienated self-love, or self-hate?
Projected and personified?

Will others help, when we remain convinced of our worthlessness?

Clean revenge upon one that harmed us arrives through attaining happiness.

Yet this glad emotion is what such past actions made so fragile.

 

And beauty
may still shine
like a reproach
on those who feel
forever excluded
from its light.

 

 

 

(1985-6)

(philosophy/psychology/mental health/thoughts/ideas/aphorisms/poetry)

 

Ethics to abuse

Lostness   (35)

 

Those who generate strife may be unlucky enough to tire of it.

 

Disillusioned idealism can end as nihilism.

 

While “examine your motives” serves for a principle: evolution trades in survival, not truth. Lies that aid existence might also grow to dominance.
(Given biological drives underpin activity, where will androids find artificial motivation?)
Even following our desires need not appear selfish, if we have altruistic desires.
Others tend to judge us on our actions toward them: in rejecting or responding to a request, for example.

 

What level of determinism is allowable in ethics, before it becomes debased?
How much control do we have over our moral sensibilities?
If I was taught to see a behaviour as bad, am I able to simply alter that perception?

 

In certain situations I have found, once a person has turned against me, whatever I do is liable to be viewed negatively. Attempting to converse has resulted in self-disclosures getting dismissed as narcissism, questions as prying, and silence as vacuity.

Now, after childhood abuse, raised to dislike what I am: I still carry an internal version of this, via endless looped condemnations. Auto-injustice.
Trapped in a toxic relationship with myself.

 

If I don’t like me, who else will?

 

Being homeless in the country of the heart: one can be homeless anywhere.

 

 

 

(Feb-Jul 1983)

(philosophy/psychology/mental health/thoughts/opinions)

 

 

Build on air

Lostness   (32)

 

“Where are those others, who feel as I do?” mutter castaways of the soul.
When loneliness appears like a destiny. To live, and die, among strangers.

 

My relationship with belief-systems is an inability to fit into any of them.
For thought, faith is a restriction.
Though we cannot build on air. At any starting-point conventions are present. Social animals tend to conformism. Group behaviour and saving face may surmount virtue. Notions of good beyond a categorical imperative, being needed for its use; the formula works inside an ethical frame, rather than generating one.
Zealots could act upon the maxim: “Always obey a divine voice, however terrible its command.” Ancient abuse might be cited in support of the new.
Ideas can coat even immorality with an insulation of sanctity.

 

The lure of a benign universe drives some to extremity.

 

Self seems to dissolve under examination, but so does object.

 

Should I attempt to speak soulfully
of some spirit that is lost
while night cloaks this world
in a profundity
dispelled by dawn?

 

 

(Feb-May 1982)

(philosophy/religion/thoughts/opinions/poetry)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Reality like a failure

Lostness   (31)

 

There are days that seem spent as a spectator in my own degradation.
When life is essentially incomplete
and even weather assumes the character of fate.

I try to remember existing without a desire to escape.

 

Reality like a failure of the imagination.

 

Emptiness is also a facet of freedom. To be undefined.

 

What to offer a soul’s distress? Should I lapse from an austerity of truth?
Exchange inhumane fact for lying kindness?
Are there consolations in philosophy?

They say: “When the pupil is ready, the master will appear.”
I have waited a lifetime for that master to show up.
Am I still unready?

Perhaps a woman could teach me?
Yet I only seek her: she never finds me.
I worry about atrophy of the capacity for love.

I want to be rent with passion, not wounds of shame, through my withered heart.

 

If I could speak these words to someone
Would I need to write them down?

 

 

(Jan-Feb 1982)

(philosophy/thoughts/questions/feelings/mental health)

 

 

Reason’s end

Lostness   (30)

 

Reasons come to an end in feelings.
I have this preference, rather than another.

 

By stripping things of their attributes we may find not essence, but emptiness.

 

An idea that nothing exists apart from experiences: leaves the unanswered question of their source.

 

Does a search tend to create its object?

 

We could enjoy thoughts of ourselves as too sophisticated for faith, while seeking a place of truth: yet can anyone live there?
Do we owe truth enough to sacrifice for it?

 

It is possible to undergo alienation from all roles: feeling like an actor of our own life.
Though acting is also a vocation.

 

Should I avoid what I cannot excel at?
Suffering for the sake of art grows more dismal the longer I remain unknown.

 

Am I to find myself through others?

 

Where the unconscious serves its purpose, consciousness will be a matter of degree.

 

When we ask about the meaning of life: what answer could satisfy us?

 

Death is not an opponent that can be fought.
Our struggles end in a silence
without explanation.

 

 

(July-Dec 1981)

(philosophy/ideas/opinions/questions)

 

 

 

 

 

 

Pockets of eternity

Lostness    (29)

 

Time is not within time; neither does it flow. Time is an abstraction of motion.

 

Do we feel truth must be simple? Things often seem simple once we come to know them, even if they appeared impossibly difficult beforehand. Though it may take a lifetime to comprehend the simplicity of a few, quite limited, subjects.

 

Existence is not decided on paper: my first thought, hearing an ontological proof.

 

That language takes its form from reality, does not mean it shows what the world is like.
Following a rule is itself a convention. Ways out of relativity lead toward metaphysics.

 

Systems which allow no exception are counter-evolutionary.

 

Convinced I have read a book before, yet remembering nothing about it: this perception taints my interaction with the text in background frustration.
Belief manifests itself in attitude. Whether the belief is true or false.

 

Institutions may coat control in a rhetoric of assistance.

 

From birth, people begin speaking to an infant. And it struggles to respond.
Only in extreme cases do we find human development without language.

 

Saying “I am happy” can mark a transition from feeling happiness to merely talking about it. Breaking the spell by reflection.

 

Is isolation a penalty of awareness?
I fear dying alone.
Lost as an old bus ticket in the pockets of eternity.

 

 

(Jan-May 1981)

(philosophy/ideas/thoughts/opinions)

Words like dead leaves

Lostness   (25)

 

Someone says: “Given that the world is divided into mental or physical spheres…”  And the fatal step has already been taken!
Dualism opens a chasm then wonders how to close it.

 

Man is a problem to himself.

 

Would we have motivation without emotion?
Even logic is a product of will.

 

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Some disconnected thoughts strive after aphorism…

 

Most systems produce attitudes unsuited to freedom.

Opinions that cannot be defended are not worth holding.

Firing-patterns: thought from the viewpoint of an electrode.

Asking a question could indicate the overcoming of a problem.

Certain optimists hope to change what people want by not giving it to them.

Arguments from design appeal to natures not disgusted by biology.

We learn the result of refusal to learn from history, from history.

For believers incapable of life, its postponement until after death seems a useful option.

Many praise virtue, yet dislike those who hold its mirror to their faces.

Love your enemies: so they may hate you even more.

Deception is parasitic upon truth.

 

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Dissatisfaction with my writing
shed in these
words like dead leaves
scattered across whiteness.

 

 

(Jan-Mar 1980)

(philosophy/ideas/aphorisms)