Fully Whole

Posted on by J.T. Homesley

I must fix my heart.
Center it
right where it is
inside me.

As you must do for yours.
Once you find it.
How I did.

Looking in all the wrong places.
In people’s faces.
Crossed mountain ranges.
In labor.
And loss.
And certainly in rediscovery.

Fix your heart.
Fix my heart.

Once you locate our broken part.
The pipe that is leaking.
Leaving good clean heart-water on the ground.
Oiled heart-pistons hesitant to pound. To push.

When it is fixed you will know.
Water will flow.
Fuel will explode.

You must find your heart and fix it.
Or you will never be fully whole.

These Details

Posted on by J.T. Homesley

Waxing hissing descending from high up in autumn breeze pushed trees.
Soft-hearted poplars and white oaks that shed skin like tall gray upright snakes.
Truck bed lower lip slammed echoed through otherwise quiet country distance.
Black scavenging ants that get on and into any available crevice.
Faded bricks segregated by weak taupe concrete lines,
and me, writing in red ink.
A poem about listening.
About eyes open watching.
Knocking down walls of swaying green
and throwing red pine straw mulch
and brown dust
and whipped black earth.

These details are what are, what is, what all, around me, exists.
A tangled consciousness such as this is no more or less
than the thread which has pierced and knit them all together.

So much of writing poems is so much no more than sewing.
Mending what was not the least bit broken.

For the mind is an eye unlike any other.
It can not be closed once it is open.

No Free Dinner for the Wise

Posted on by J.T. Homesley

You come to terms with dying because you intend to live.
It doesn’t mean you won’t fight to keep alive,
it just recognizes the reality that there will come a circumstance when you don’t.
Enlightenment is like that moment during an amazing dinner,
something you didn’t plan on, a meal set out most likely by a stranger,
when you feel called to ask how you can pay for it.
The moment you create a bill for yourself,
even though none was ever handed to you.
Foolish to everyone except the wise. The enlightened.
Who came to terms with dying.
Just to get on with life.

Of Man and Mirrors

Posted on by J.T. Homesley

At first, self awareness always feels like the world is ending.
But that is not what is happening here.

We are witnessing the birth of our first population-wide form of self-awareness.
We glimpsed ourselves as a species. And it has given all of us an identity crisis.

This is not the end of the world.

It is the cultural equivalent of what most animals do when seeing their reflection for the first time. These are the birthing pains of new consciousness.

A great reckoning of Man and mirrors.