Category Archives: Poetry Work

A collection of various poems I have written in relation to horror, fantasy or the supernatural

Inquiring Minds, Poetry Work

Being at Ease

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Being effortlessly at ease
May be the hardest thing in life
to achieve.

Without drink, without drugs, without approvals, or validations needed.

To just be.

Can be attained but often elusive.

Does that encapsulate us as humans as a whole?

That we really are just simply animals always ready for flight or fight, or to fall over and just play dead?

Surely so.

And there is no bad or good in that statement, it is just simply is.

To be at ease in any given situation
to be remain focused and discipline
without the palpitations of the heart, the sweating of palms, the electric tension coursing, the narrowing of your world as you are compressed by four walls, or being pulled like a soft taffy through a press,

These are all our bodily responses to a world that can be threatening, cruel, chaotic, slighting and apathetic, and lonely at times.

To be fully relaxed, however,
To be immersed in a seemingly forever flow of pleasure, to be wrapped up in rapture, pure and intense with nothing more than to feed your need to feel all the good that life could possibly offer is a gift when it comes and should always be cherished, held tightly to, and adored, for who knows when it may again.

This being at ease.

Seek it in life in all its forms, from nature, to friends, to lovers, to surprising adventures around the next corner of your life not yet written

Be bold in seeking it for you are most worthy of finding it.

By Philip Wardlow March 28th, 2025

Inquiring Minds, Poetry Work

I am here

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I am here on this planet

I'm a 400 Trillion to one shot to even exist on this planet.

Yet here I am,
Breathing, Living, Loving, Being Loved
I matter and that is amazing to me

You matter also
You matter
You are that 1 in a Trillion chance as well.
So live.

by Philip Wardlow Feb 5th, 2025

Inquiring Minds, Poetry Work

The Raven Prince Flies

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I call myself the Raven Prince, for I am dark, intelligent and wise, and playful to a fault, shy enough to not trust enough until an allotted time of my choosing and even then I am on my guard of you.
A Raven is a solitary creatures at times
unlike the Crow with a clan perhaps
numbering in the tens to a hundred strong.
Me, I am no Crow.
I am but a lonely Raven with only a few raven friends
who find me.
A Lonely life, for even the other ravens do not truly know me
Not for any of the ways I find I need them to.
So I am a lonely Raven even when amongst them
Yet, I fly…
because it easy, it’s effortless
to find distraction in the heights,
to see all the beauty laid out below me
waiting to be discovered just by me
and only me internally.
I am the Prince of Ravens you see.,
isolated, above the others, not by choice
but simply because my place is not
amongst them,
Why?
I could wonder why until I have died
and still not know the reason why.
I have always felt it though since a child.
It just is.
So I fly to distract
Ever higher, ever lower….
wherever I choose.
I will choose it
because I am the Raven Prince

by Philip Wardlow Dec, 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
 
  
Inquiring Minds, Poetry Work

Circe, the tragic Goddess of Love

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She dwelled deep in the dark woods, on the isle of Aeaea off the west coast of Italy in the Mediterranean Sea in a glorious palace all alone.

Alone you say? You would be wrong to think that. Oh very wrong indeed.

For she was surrounded by a menagerie of pets always keeping her company; from the wolves that roamed far and wide, to lions lazily lingering near her as she sat her throne, to the birds nesting at her feet, or the occasional pig rutting the grounds outside.

Some called her a Goddess, others knew her to be an enchantress, or the darkest of witches to ever run afoul of.

What ever she was, all knew her as Circe, the woman who lived on the island of Aeaea, with hair of flowing fiery rays and oftentimes a temper to suit. 

She was no temptress, yet some did claim her to be the daughter of a sea nymph, so that is perhaps why many a man was beguiled to find himself led to her isle.

Lucky you could be, if you were to find her. However, she did not suffer fools, for if you were funny and clever and easy on her eyes, she would take you as her lover and perhaps let you leave after a year and a day.

But be you arrogant or a swine, well, she would surely turn you into one, to rut the grounds of her great estate like the pig you were.

Turn away her advances of love and devotion, she might just concoct a potion for you to drink to transform your soul and form into that of a loyal lion always by her side.

Think you her better? She would send you to join the pack that roams the island always at her beck and call, and you would serve, oh so willingly with a snarl and a smile.

Oh, be you a resistant King come to call? Well, a bird you could become, wings clipped, with a special place for you nesting at her feet nearby.

Never satisfied was Circe of love being denied when wanting to be given, she is a cautionary tale of many a man’s follies followed soon by her own.

So diabolically desperate was she, always to love, that none ever did in return, for they always saw the darkness seething underneath tucked away in her heart.

Unrequited love will forever perhaps be her destiny until her heart finds its true form from whence it was first born, at peace, light, and burning with the intensity of a thousands suns.

By Philip Wardlow Dec 27th,2023

Inquiring Minds, Poetry Work

Falling to Me

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This very day of days, six years ago, she fell, 
unprotected, falling fast
falling hard, 
but never did I think her destiny and I's were 
linked.

For what would a beauty such  as she want with a simple man like me?
As always, I was too blind to see.

Surely I was just a dalliance, a distraction, a small detour
on the road to a much bigger prize.

But there she was,  as soft as you please , entangled in my
arms, wanting the solace and the silence, not just my manly charms
in the sheets.

She wanted the comfort, the safety, the silence in her mind, all intertwined with a kiss and small caress.

She fell then , fell, fell like a stone into a welcoming well, and I enveloped her, 
her beautiful warmth permeating deep, deep, deep within me.

I was hers then, body and soul.

Hers alone.


by Philip Wardlow Dec 20th, 2023










Inquiring Minds, Poetry Work

My Hinterland

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~ Hinterland: an area lying beyond what is visible or known 

An area I wish to go,
to get lost in like a hermit
in the woods of nowhere,
that somewhere no one else goes to because it can not be found.

Not at dawn, nor dusk, nor the in-between times

It’s all my time, my time.
My adventure, my mind, my place in my head of heads
where I softly tread a Universe of my own discoveries and foundlys of unique thought.

Mine to wrestle and wrangle and comingle the depths of philosophical phrases.

No matter how crazy, cruel, lazy, kind, or neurotic, dare I say perhaps erotic.

Just let it be. Let me be.

Let me find the way, or get lost on the way to this Hinterland I wish to call my home.

By Philip Wardlow Nov, 2023