Poetic Referendum(s) On Life

Sand And Tide

We All Serve Some-thing?

Landfall! Landfall!
Crash more my shore.
Glint sand smush, push,
Divide with obedient tide
Nightlong, daylong
On this soft, bare shore.

Beneath white glow command,
Flatten smooth, race and hide.
My brown girth yearns, spills out
With you to drown in the dead
Where you leave me lie.


5.23.23
6.11.24 edits for grammar, structre, added words

Also, note on 6.11.24 (in part, recollecting beneficial email conversations with a supportive member to help this flawed perception)

life arrives with such excitement, drawing us in, we want to join and feel the crushing weight. When it leaves, we feel loss, left and decide we want more, chase it. It comes back again, takes us further out, where we are lost among the nothing, and get left again. Then what? I chose not to decide how the narrative feels about choice and outcome. The reader can decide how it relates to their own experiences from joy like tides washing over us, to what's left when they're gone and we have nothing but memory to show for it. It's decided, this person is along, despite the nature parallel to human intervention manipulating and leaving the excited sand to float and sink, like death to leave your home for someplace dark, deep and something that takes away the life support of air, to the 'now what?' ending. We know sand does not need love of air, light, but what does it say about the human condition if just life itself leaves us at the bottom of some ocean. Do readers/poet decide fate after the sudden end? Think for just a moment, we don't have to follow the tides? Follow the tides, deciding we don't care about outcome? Assign risk? Reward? Or, just go with it?

and so on, and so forth.

really, not a poem meant to be a thinker until rewritten and recalled and seeing the underlying. Most of my poetry with mantra usually is trying to express through metaphor and allegory that there are hidden dangers in life, if we do not assess, be proactive. The older I get, more seasoned as writer, I realize, fuck it. Go for it. Call out the phonies and just watch them practice. Just, don't let them manipulate me. Back off, maybe give them a hand slap. Definitely, don't call them out. Narcissists will draw that line around what you call the truth and get you to argue with yourself, rather than acknowledge the truth in points you make. You'll get nullified either way, in their eyes. Avoidance, if possible. But, don't stop striving to be you, the best you can, and always keep learning, if only how not to get dumped in the middle of nowhere.

the above bit, unedited on 6.11.24. a free write and not pre-planned or adhered philosophy, but from circumstantial evidence presented and accumulating, helping me make up my mind about the perepheral things, heading toward the candy center of the saccharin thing.