I see you in the mirror,
No longer young.
These thoughts are reserved for youth,
High school,
College,
When you don't fully realize what you are not worth.
But now?
Now, you know.
These thoughts fill your head with concrete.
They fill your mouth with stones.
They weigh down your limbs like cinder blocks.
You can't think.
You can't speak.
You were thrown into the water the day you were born,
But you still don't know how to swim.
The water rejects you.
Cast up on a desert island,
I dream I hear the ocean.
I dream of castles we built along its shore.
But I am a blind cat, restless and prowling,
Searching for food,
Searching for affection,
Finding only the sand that sears my feet,
The relentless rays of a shadowless sun,
The white prison of my thoughts.
8/17
© 2017 Edward P. Morgan III
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ReplyDeleteNotes and asides:
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This one started while we were watching Thirteen Reasons Why over the weekend. Specifically the poetry episode. The first stanza came to me right after.
The second stanza came in the middle of the night and got jotted down on lighted notepad beside the bed.
The final stanza is based on three lines I found written on the back of the note card I’d used the night before. Based on other notes there, the lines date back to before February. They came from a vivid dream I had about our blind cat, Sandy.
White prison is a term I use to describe summer in Florida. The sun is like an arc welder and I feel trapped inside.
Picture Notes:
ReplyDeleteWe have a bowl of stones on our dinning room table. (I am a geologist, after all, so it’s not that strange.) Using the allusion to stones in this poem, I took the bowl out on to the porch about midday. That gave me a nice even light to work with. Just photographing the bowl didn’t work, so I took the stones out, and laid them out on the porch floor, spread out enough to get good coverage and give the impression of a lot more stones then there actually were. They have been polished, so they have a nice wet look. I tried to place them in an interesting pattern, trying not to clump together ones of the same color or similar color. Afterward there was not a lot of post processing in this one. I upped the vibrance a little, did a tiny bit of cropping and that was it. It give the impression of a lot of stones, but they only covered about a square foot on the floor.