Monthly Archives: July 2024

Inquiring Minds, Poetry Work

Whimsy

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whimsy

I see life going by for the majority to my eye
on a whim.
Some,
I call Friends?
I’d like to feel that most of them
are.
But sometimes I feel like a whim
to them
As well.
At times.
A tolerated indulgence,
a distraction
they don’t have a
compulsion to fully realize.
Because the coolness
in me
doesn’t come close to them or those they
seek for true company.
I have been weighed you see,
by eyes that only
see what they wish to see.
in me.
So they never seek beyond
the surface to the
true me
That I rarely let others see.
So I live in whimsy
Now
Free from the, “What now?”
Mentality that once ruled
Inside
Of asking all the other lost encounters did you

ever wish to truly know me anyway.

by Philip Wardlow July, 2024

Inquiring Minds, Poetry Work

The Cat and the Poison

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I don’t believe in a hell or a heaven

I don’t believe in any of the three thousand plus gods which meander through the minds of man now or ever have throughout the ages.

I do believe we are an important inception point in Earth’s history, but perhaps even that is a vain course of thinking of our human condition.

Time will tell if we are but a fundamental fantastical failure waiting to happen or something more than we even suppose.

Ah, but there’s the rub. How ever are we going to truly know the outcome of us?

Time is a far-flung thing.

It cannot be curtailed or cut, bought or borrowed, it can only be endured, we are self placed into a closed box with a flask of poison like Schrodinger’s cat but instead we are the cat and also the very poison that may kill us inside as we are closed inside with it, us.

Eventually or not at all, are the only two outcomes.

It’s not for us to know, for we are dead and alive at the same time and the poison just sits with us in that box looking more menacing but delicious with every day we sit with it.

By Philip Wardlow July, 2024

Inquiring Minds, Poetry Work

This Maze

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Maze

Even if we had a road map in this maze
of life we would still get lost.
Reason why?
We all go the way we ultimately want,
even through pitfalls, dead ends
and switchbacks,
Thinking we know better,
feel we know better,
know we know better than
the lines already burned onto
the pages of the past
from the ones who
came before that,
drawing their travels in blood
and then us tearing up the map.

The current oh “wise ones” say, “I see your pain you
went through, sir or madam,
but ya know what? I think I wish
to go through the same
just to see if the outcome
will be different for me.”

And surprise, surprise
it isn’t,
So we cry, we cry
and wonder why
we were all denied
that blue ribbon or
that shiny gold star that others seem so often to attain
Is it perhaps because you never
learned that golden lesson…

Life doesn’t owe you shit.

by Philip Wardlow July, 2024

Inquiring Minds, Poetry Work

When Feeling was easy

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When I was kid, I  soaked up the
world like a sponge,
I lived and loved life like it was breathing into me,
from building a fort, riding my bike, daydreaming on the
grass while figuring out what was in the clouds, hiking in the woods
with my brothers,  making discovery upon discovery, 
with my family
even when it was at its hardest.
I felt it all, the joy, the anger, the rage, the sorrow, the fear
all the certainties of a day.
I felt it
There was no ambiguity about it.
I was in it and it was glorious!
Head down, I strode forth into it.
from school, to my first girlfriend, to lost girlfriends,
to family dysfunction piling upon the pile
that had already been there, to marriage,
to birth, to divorce, to remarriage,
to new joys, to new stresses.
I road it all like a surfer catching a
wave, I was cheered and revered
at my feats of strength, my charms, and
my worth at being such a great man.
Somewhere along the way through all that 
I became afraid of reaching, feeling,
seeing, breathing, knowing, discovering, engaging.
I want that wonder back.
A part of me won't venture there,
for whatever fear that dwells in
me sees it is a perilous path,  a wish that
is fraught with failures not wanting to be found
I still love and notice the  all seeming magic that is life, whether tangible in
a kiss or a touch,  or a breeze  rushing over you at just the right
time on a sunny day. 
I do still feel it but
a majority of that magic has been muted
perhaps forever more for me.


By Philip Wardlow July  2024