Okay, we admit that poetry and reality are not exactly two tastes that go well together. That is, isn’t poetry a vehicle for escaping reality? Perhaps sometimes it is, but it is also a means of coming into touch with our own hidden inner realities. Poetry helps shatter shallow frames of reference so that we can see deeper empirical realities. Is that deep enough for you? Time to slip on some shoes and head out the door into reality via our verse!
Imminent Reality, a poem
by Justin Thyme
Reuse the towel,
it’s dried in the sun
I’ll make you lunch if you do;
I love you.
Carnal pleasures denied
for existential values
is how I got to know you;
I did it for poetry
not for reason.
You died not long after
and I’d have not known you
if I’d given in,
what a loss that would’ve been,
so much for reality.
Blue cheese dressing
with sugar and vinegar,
a treat to be sure;
marijuana out back
grown for defiance
not consumption.
It comes back in a dream
our roles have reversed,
I leave you there,
angry at what you did;
then I find you’re missing out
on all that is so important —
turkey, pumpkin pie,
and cranberry sauce
I seek you out
on an abandoned road
past that old shipyard
where they try to stop me
until I pretend I’m a tourist.
Then at the small ferry,
where we all must go some day,
I find my cousin and he brings you to me
across the large flowing waters.
I’d bring you home, I say.
But then I remember,
you’re gone forever now,
my imminent reality.
Threshold of Reality, a poem
by Paul Bearer
The blubbery, viscid mud that you sink into
is a force larger than you. It’s a reality
that tugs at your descending boots.
Reality will pull those boots
right off your toes. There’ll be
a resounding swoosh.
Reality faces you
with natural inner contradictions
that slow you down.
These are mathematical errors
too delicate be be perceived
burning infections, spasms.
Reality is just below
the threshold of perception. It’s
an increase of reverse action.
Reality is so frictionless
that is resists all cohesion. It is
as it were, an animal process —
This is the diminution of you
lost in your own magnified chaos;
all of it, a carefully balanced stagnation.
Reality Crushes In, a poem
by Marya Ophir
Inborn ideas assail me
with misfortunes; these are
responses adapted for a lizard.
I’ll scream at myself to run
when I know that I should stay;
these are inclinations —
deviations, devastations,
a priori and valid disasters.
I’m waiting on the brink
at the fringe of my mind
and I’m dripping off
out into another world.
I’ve caught only a fraction of it;
day in and day out, these
daydreams of tomorrow fade
and reality crushes in.
Words have no power to impress the mind without the exquisite horror of their reality.
— Edgar Allan Poe
Okay, now we have to ask. Were any of your textual models of the world shattered? Are you ready to incorporate a philosophy of realism into your life? Ha, perhaps not yet, and that’s all well in good, because there are more poems for you to read here. You’d better go the side bar and follow Shadow of Iris so you don’t miss any of them!