Lughnasa 2017 – Two Short Poems

Over the years, people have told me that they see me a particular, often consistent way. They use words like driven, organized, persistent, intense. I’ve heard I’m intimidating. That I have eyes that look right through you. I’ve been told people envy my life, my opportunities. Some of them have been downright jealous, not in a positive way. Some frustrated that I don’t seem to recognize what I have. But most seem to agree that it looks like I know what I want, what I’m doing, and where I’m going.

News flash: Appearances can be deceiving. Objects may be closer than they look. All of us feel like frauds. Some of us just acknowledge the reflection more quickly than others.

As I remember, Life’s Path came to me pretty much in one sitting. It reflects how I felt about my life at the time. How I feel again. How I think many people feel off and on. Some all the time.  

I don’t specifically remember what I was thinking as I wrote this. I can piece together the events that led up to it and events that happened after. This fell in a lull in what I think of as monumental events. Life-defining at any rate. So a quiet moment. An interstice.

For two years, I’d been struggling to come to terms with someone else’s recently revealed secret and other people’s reactions to it. The landscape behind was pockmarked with the scars of battle, now faded but easily recognized as having reshaped the terrain even if incompletely grassed over. Two years later, I had embarked on a completely new path into the unknown, one I was warned by multiple people on multiple occasions was a mistake, as were my preparations along the way. I think they saw the outcome as something quite Grimm.

And yet, here I am. Still stumbling forward. Still laying my own path. Still lost.

When you get lost, the experts advise that the best thing you can do is stop moving. You are likely to make your situation worse. Sit and wait for someone to notice you are missing, to mount a search and come find you.

But what happens if no one’s looking?

Your next best bet is to inventory your situation and pick a direction you think will lead you someplace you want to go. Of course, most people strike out to intersect a major road that leads back to civilization, not delve deeper into the wilderness.

Either way, the experts will also tell you that personal psychology plays an important role in survival. Staying positive about your situation is critical. Even if it means fooling yourself by following a trail of breadcrumbs you throw out before you. Eventually, you will get somewhere.

I am still hoping wherever I end up in the dark forest of this life isn’t made out of gingerbread. Though sometimes I do very much feel as though my metaphorical home in this society never had enough provisions for someone like me, which is why I set out. I try to remember that’s why I wake up each morning, though some mornings that is more difficult than others.

Recently, I read an article which said newer poets tend to confuse obscurity with meaning. I think Morning Ritual might fall into that category. I’ve had people who have read it say they weren’t sure what it was about. Which I can totally understand. (It’s about coffee, by the way, if the picture didn’t give that away).

This is another piece that came to me in a single sitting. Once again, I can’t tell you exactly what was going on at the time. Though I have the distinct impression that I was tired and headachy which often inspires creativity in that detached, lightly tethered kind of way. Perhaps I wasn’t fully caffeinated. I don’t know how many people I’ve met who are completely transparent before they are fully awake and have a chance to don their daily mask. Only after that first cup of coffee do they appear to be solid again.

I didn’t start drinking coffee regularly until I was twenty-eight. I started because I was getting migraines and had read research that indicated a cup or two of coffee each day might help mitigate them. Since then, the number of migraines I get has gone down but not disappeared. Oddly, when one is just beginning, or doesn’t quite take hold, I get some of my most colorful bursts of creativity. Though working through them can be quite a trick. It takes more discipline than people realize to write down those odd thoughts, observations and lines through the fog and pain. But more about that at the equinox maybe.

This one perhaps best represents how my mind naturally works in those unguarded moments, with layers of allusion and symbolism sometimes densely packed. It reminds me of some of the better daily lines I posted several years later, many of which have served as the foundation for other poems, or sometimes more poetic essays.

It’s strange to me how some of what I call poetry starts out as just simple statements of how I feel that then get cut up and rearranged into something someone else might recognize as a poem. When I first write out many of the lines in a notebook, I often think they are the opening lines of an essay. Sometimes it takes running across them years later to recognize they were actually complete thoughts on their own all alone. That all they need is light editing and structuring.

Sometimes I think the old vocabulary words that surface at these times, along with the snippets of mythology, archetypes and odd perspective, are like the floaters you see swimming before your eyes. Detached bits of subconscious code that echo in memory until they briefly interact as a valid instruction set. When they go noted, they often are soon forgotten. Or maybe they just submerge until they encounter another upwelling from the deep. Or become diffuse as they’re reabsorbed and reintegrated.

Or perhaps they are just the trail of breadcrumbs my subconscious throws out before me in this dark wood so I don’t lose my way again. 


© 2017 Edward P. Morgan III