“Everything that needs to be said has already been said. But, since no one was listening, everything must be said again.” – Andre Gide
While wordifying our wounds
Thoughts congeal when bleeding
As the gathered crowd communes
The time for action is in deeding
Shared with dVerse – verbing
Today’s Daily Stoic poem:
2 a.m.
and that cat
is crying again
fed just thirty minutes ago
apparently
not enough
my brain is soggy
my feet are slurring
another spoonful
in the bowl
and back to bed
into lucid dreams
and erratic thinking
the universe is revealed
to me
of course
we’ve got it
all wrong
the universe
is inside out
and the earth
is all around
the edges
and the centre
of the universe
is in the middle
time and space
behave differently
as you go closer
towards the centre
under the earth
there is nothing
but hell
the more we move
towards the middle
the closer to god
we get
having this
almost fully formed
and ready to submit
to science
the cat cries again
at the end of the bed
for fuck’s sake!
A true story, as we nursed our old, sick cat back to health a couple of weeks ago, making sure that he ate whenever he wanted.
Shared with dVerse Poetics – irreverence
Today’s Daily Stoic poem:
the tick
tick
clicking
creaking
on the stairs
...
three incessant brides
seductive
and cold
count steps
into a darkened cellar
strewn with time's dead flowers
and déjà vu
...
tick
tick
click
Shared with dVerse Poetics, taking Bauhaus’ Bela Lugosi’s Dead as inspiration and borrowing the line ‘strewn with time’s dead flowers’. Béla Ferenc Dezső Blaskó was Bela Lugosi’s full name.
Prompt: Write from inside an abandoned mansion after midnight. There is no obvious ghost—yet every room suggests someone has only just left.
Today’s Daily Stoic poem:
Awed by eternal inflation
brane strings me along
In infinite miniature
a brain fractures in fractals.
Where am I going?
Where have I been?
Nice to meet you, Mae—
'Is that a universe in your pocket
or are you just pleased to see me?'
Shared with dVerse Quadrille #257: A Pocket in Your Poems, using The Meta-Zone from the comic book Shade The Changing Man and some words and phrases taken from string theory, pointing towards the idea of a pocket universe.
Today’s Daily Stoic poem:
Man is sick but he can’t rest
the dog sleeps all day, dreaming of running
Faith is never pure and rarely true
it takes a degree of intellect to behave that stupidly.
A family measures time in dogs and cats
but my stomach and bladder tell me the time
We of the low-style, vulgar horde:
can you imagine the boredom of being a god?
Life has never been so good
and I’ve never felt so bad
I am full of self-inflicted knowledge
I’m nothing, if not a contradictory man
Every translation begins and ends in failure
—ravishing portraits of otherwise
Walking around with the weight of his potential
The poet acts as a guide
Written for the dVerse prompt to break form with couplets, this piece let me use random lines I’d noted down over time. The first and penultimate lines link to their origin. The ‘vulgar-horde’ line is taken from Dante’s Inferno. The ‘translation’ line was definitely appropriated from somewhere now forgotten and the ‘ravishing portraits’ line is by Maria Popova.
Today’s Daily Stoic poem:
As the language of the night settles in,
with a candle raised to the sky.
The way ahead is slippery and sodden
—a vanishing point, a future sigh.
A gloved hand held, we wend our way
to the rolling river, quiet and moody.
The conspiring trees shake their bones
at your subtle ceramic beauty.
Your trusting eyes make no plea
as you submerge under the darkened depths.
Your silken arms are the last I see,
the last twinkling that the moon protects.
I walk with you, across the many bridges
that lead us out to the troubled seas.
I’ll wait for you on the silent shore,
framed in judgement by those ageless trees.
Written for dVerse Poetics and inspired by the paintings of John Atkinson Grimshaw, whom I’d never heard of before, but can see very clearly an England that I feel very familiar with. While the use of light in the paintings is somewhat seductive, I couldn’t help but let the darkness in with a story of forbidden love ending in quiet tragedy.
Today’s Daily Stoic poem:
Leaving dusty footprints on Texan soil,
a drifting unemployed taxi driver.
Stumbling through nights of doubt,
towards seedy lighthouses that shone brightest.
He scratched her name on napkins, in margins,
on the fogged glass of Greyhounds—
rehearsing a love that would never be more
than a monologue for his mirrors.
Believing the act would be a sentence,
six shots, one ricocheted love letter,
so that on his arrival,
history might remember him
as something other than a ghost.
Shared with dVerse Poetics: Pilgrimage and reflecting on the story of John Hinckley Jr.
Today’s Daily Stoic poem:
Shared with dVerse MTB: Five Leavings From Home and inspired by my own movement of home around the world.
Today’s Daily Stoic poem:
All the lines here have been taken from An Existential Guide to: Making Friends (with some minor editing). Shared with dVerse: descort
Today’s Daily Stoic poem:
This stone is a memory
and memories are not truth.
I carry these stones in a box,
dripping nostalgia all over my shoes.*
The box fills faster than I can make room,
old rocks settle down below.
Some get stuck between my toes,
as I limp toward another show.
It's already Tuesday again.
I've got a pile of Tuesdays stashed away,
wearing themselves down to sand,
rattling the box with every shake.
Running my finger along the edges
for the last time—I'll know,
I'll divine them across the floor
and see what remains.
Written for dVerse Poetics – stone
* – appropriated from Makenna Karas
Today’s Daily Stoic poem:
