Spicy stewed chicken drumsticks

The hopeless thing

Sometimes the hopeless thing is the necessary thing.

New poems

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On death

As dark is to light, death is to darkness.

Not the kind

The kind of people who thrive
in the kind of world we've made
are not my kind.

Unacceptable (Seay)

Childhood's end arrives when we realize that the world is unacceptable. Am I right? It's unacceptable! It's corrupt! It is a vale of sorrows, a kitchen full of smoke, a perpetual travail. What can we do? We can capitulate. We can give up our expectations, and accept what is the case. Or, we can fight. We can resist. Here, I think, is where the desire to create originates: from this great visceral disgust with the world, and with the experience of living in it. I'm not speaking of a desire to reform or reshape the world, mind you. I'm talking about the desire to negate it entirely, to replace it with something better, more suited to ourselves. In recognizing this desire, of course, we find ourselves in the company of our two friends, the poet and the magus.

Martin Seay, The Mirror Thief

The poet & the poem

The poet is consciousness; the poem is experience processed through consciousness.

New poems

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People's capacity (Seay)

You should never underestimate people's capacity to believe weird things.

Martin Seay, The Mirror Thief

Illusion

The visual illudes the visionary.

Error

Our engines run on error.

Mysterious (Matisse)

There are so many things I would like to understand, and most of all myself—after a half century of hard work and reflection the wall is still there. Nature—or rather, my nature—remains mysterious.

Henri Matisse

Where to go

Walk away from those trying to make your world smaller; follow the ones who offer to enlarge it.

New poems

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Totem (Hampl)

Or maybe that has been the point, even the project, of modernity: to abandon the gaze, to give over to the glimpse. Accept that truth is relative, authenticity is personal, and art is the business of broken bits. Admit that the fragment is our totem. And that catching things on the fly, no matter how exhausting, is more real and right than any fullness of classic form.

Patricia Hampl, Blue Arabesque

The hardest

The hardest falsehood to reject
is what should be true but isn't.

OK (Stewart)

I think now a whole life can be spent OK
giving up love, waiting for thunder.

Arthur J. Stewart, from "Waiting For Thunder"

Yourself

You have yourself to think.

On grief

Who dares relinquish grief,
when what remains when it goes
is so much worse?

New poems

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