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.
As if this prose would disappear
like acid rain, last week’s paycheque,
or the Ford Pinto.
I will undoubtedly forget or move on
to a new concern, overlooking recurring
supermarket mass shootings, a fentanyl
crisis, or cautionary tales as society
remains as calm as it is corrupt.
We seem to reliably take advice from
televangelists with Brylcreem-slick
schemes or deleterious demagogues,
while ignoring the poet
who speaks ostensibly
not of spring,
but of the dread instead.
The patina of the words dull in
perpetuity and still they attempt to
sum up happenstance emotions
caught within disarming actualities.
They, poets or society itself, cannot
know any better when speaking
of so much worse.
04/30/2024 j.g.l.
April is Poetry Month
it happens every year
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.