The answers are far less certain
than even last week, to all those
perennial questions or solutions
you might seek.
What do you believe, or
what do you believe in?
Come Monday, you have fewer
questions than you had last week.
For a while there are less doubts
in what you believe.
Whom do you believe in,
and who believes in you?
11/18/2024 j.g.l.
We want to know what
we don’t know, or hadn’t thought of,
or forgot.
What mattered then,
or what mattered when, shifts over time.
We notice.
Perception is what you don’t see.
Deception is what know.
You see it differently through your aloneness.
The truth behind a lie,
you question how and why.
It made sense.
Anticipation keeps us waiting
for only so long. Will it matter
if you felt it never did?
© 2021 j.g. lewis
Slow down: even with the ideas that come to quicky. Take the time to acknowledge the feelings that arrive, as they arrive.
Write it down. How else will you remember what you were thinking?
Print neatly. You hardly understand the thoughts at the time, why make it more difficult to comprehend weeks or years from now?
Follow your own logic; only you need to truly make sense of what is happening, or all that has happened.
Pay attention to the lessons of the past. Be mindful that not all are worth repeating.
Clarity. Make corrections as you go. Flaws become more difficult to correct the longer you live with them.
11/14/2024 j.g.l.
I'm like a pencil;
sometimes sharp,
most days
well-rounded,
other times
dull or
occasionally
broken.
Still I write.
j.g. lewis
is a writer/photographer in Toronto.
It’s touching how the music of your past will cause you to wonder, or create newfound feelings.
I’ve been playing a lot of old vinyl lately, at random, for no other reason than to fill the silence with worthwhile noise. Nostalgia seems to have crept in.
Yesterday morning I played Hold On by Dan Hill, a popular Canadian folksinger/songwriter in the mid-70s. The album’s title track was, then, a big hit with its massive background choir, epic arrangement, and inspiring lyrics.
I enjoyed the song, then, in the ‘70s.
I was more touched by it yesterday, more than I was then. What I remember.
The words spoke to me differently, or they seemed to have a purpose I did not or would not have been able to comprehend then, in the ‘70s.
Still they affected me. Then.
And they did yesterday.
I don’t previously remember the lump in my throat, or my eyes welling up because the lyrics took on a new meaning. The words showed themselves as they hadn’t before, not as a teenager could imagine. Like, previously, it was conceptual, and I did not know how to read between the lines.
I believe good songs, strong music, or poetry and great literature will resonate with you dependent upon age, circumstance, or where you are in life geographically or mentally.
At times, art will take you back to remind you. Other times it will question the changes.
The art remains the same. You, or your interpretation of it, are different.
I should hope to be different than I was more than 40 years ago. I have earned the right to feel stories and songs through my own ears and not simply as they were told to me.
I have survived. I have been tested and I have tried. I have failed, and I have survived, and I’m still holding on to what I believe in.
And I still listen to the music, not to remind me, but to continue encouraging and inspiring me, as it did then.
As it did yesterday. . .
12/23/2019 j.g.l.
I’m like a pencil;
sometimes sharp,
most days
well-rounded,
other times
dull or
occasionally
broken.
Still I write.
j.g. lewis
is a writer/photographer in Toronto.