A little cold, little wet,
a little tired and yet
I am here. Still,
full of wonder.
The morning chill leaves
little to the imagination
and much less
to hope for.
Expected, perhaps, as it
always is, this time, this
season is only what
we ask of it.
11/21/2024 j.g.l.
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
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.
Poets say
April showers bring May flowers
So too say the liars, the preachers and prostitutes
who come to express what they’ve heard, but not
what they know.
Unlike poets,
the doubtful and the disenchanted
often cry foul as we together mourn the loss of
common sense and decency.
A tarnished soul with a litany of pleas, a poet learns
words are worth little more than sand if not spoken
with wisdom derived from a broken heart, physical
traits of emotional details, and second-hand lessons
from third-rate teachers.
It hurts to bleed.
It hurts to need validation.
Honesty is not worth what it once was, but comes
at a significant cost.
April soon, May will surely follow,
and politicians will say only what they want to hear
(like the prostitutes and preachers). Fraudsters all.
Only the poet sees the crime, unless
you know wherein the message lies.
Society becomes as calm as it is
corrupt, when we take the words of a televangelist or
talk-show host as truth. Moving swiftly through topic
of the day – fentanyl crisis or racial pain – they don’t
know any better when speaking of so much worse.
Nor can they tell the difference between
propaganda and verse.
The poet writes not of spring flowers,
but of the dread instead.
Whom else but a poet (or discarded lover)
would sit in the rain and wait for tulips to bloom?
Other souls think it too impractical, too illogical, or
simply too wet to care.
Them who cannot taste the difference
between raindrops and a salty tear
may never know bona fide honesty
until they read about it.
© 2021 j.g.lewis
April is Poetry Month
all poetry all the time
right here
poetry every day
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.