Tag Archives: life

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

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

Inquiring Minds, Poetry Work

Great Expectations of the Souls

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What Soul have you?

Young and Impressionable, or Old and Jaded?

Both have their pitfalls.

The young one will put up with too much and wait too long to get out.

The old one will take a beautiful
moment and stomp it to death while crying into their pillow at night.

Expectations of the Impressionable Soul are racing, fun and fluid, chaotic and tragic in an instant of time

Expectations of a Jaded Soul is exhausting, impenetrable, and walled on all four sides with catapults launching flaming balls of fire.

Both want everything life has to offer, but the thing is, one is willing to give too much to get it, while the other doesn’t believe the offering of everything exists anymore, if it ever did.

So I ask, which one are you?

Hmm…or is there another option behind Door#3

By Philip Wardlow October, 2021

Inquiring Minds, Poetry Work

Melancholy Ebb and Flow

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At times the tides can be low with the seas pulled back from my shore, leaving an empty wet beach of flopping fish and half broken seashells and garbage mingling in the flotsam and jetsam amongst an almost barren terrain of foreign smells.

When in this low tide, I feel underwhelmed in life, not seen enough,  not heard enough, not understood enough, not known enough, not connected enough
not wanted enough. All the enoughs being never enough.

Then flip that, when the ocean is high and the waves are rugged and  crash hard with a splendor of driving  kinetic energy, when the universe seemingly has all its sights set upon me to thrive and live lively as a person could ever be, I live gloriously!

Life, throwing it all at me,  from the left , right, forward and behind, overwhelming me ,  surging, filling me full to bursting.
and then I do.

I think I have always had this rhythm in me, this cycling of not quite heaven and not quite hell and all the thoughts they bring.  A very fickle Melancholy

I don't want to feel sometimes because it all becomes too much to. One because I know it will end. That feeling.  It will  end, never to return and I will miss it.

At other times I want to feel it all, like a greedy child at a candy shop, mindful of all the sights, and feelings, and intimacies, soaking it in, in the moment, truly not a care for the future. I am filled with a  smile and laugh that lasts  forever in me in that moment..

I know I am a lucky man.  A very lucky man. So so lucky in my life compared to others.

So I hold to that thought.  That I am a lucky man.

The luckiest man that ever there was.

By Philip Wardlow September 12th, 2023
Inquiring Minds, Poetry Work

Bloody Car Load of Resentments

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I don't ever wish to come home and not truly see you or not want to.
I don't ever wish not to be truly seen by you or you not want to see me.
I don't ever wish for all our bloody car load of resentments to ever cause us
to drive off the road over a cliff into despair, anxiety, anger or despondence for each other.

I want contentment in one another to be our loadstone, to  pull us towards the mirth in life,  the tranquil moments, and to delight in the delving of what made us fall in love, and to always be ready to be jubilant with another without fear, judgement or reproach. 

I want you to fall into my arms and for me to fall into yours, lovely, tenderly,  for all the years down the road  together ahead, flinging resentments to the wind out the car window, and holding  fast to each others hands like new lovers on  a magical trip, seeking new discoveries around every bend.

by Philip Wardlow  August 21, 2023
Inquiring Minds, Poetry/Quote of the Week

Taking the Time

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That first date we road a Merry-Go-Round together because I wanted you to experience the magic of the world that I knew you sought inside yourself that had been so long denied.

I wanted to show you how cherished by me you already were and would be for all our days to come. I couldn’t tell you that just yet, but I felt all the feels for you and wanted to give you my world and share every adventure with you for the rest of our days together.

Five years on that feeling has not changed a bit.

Yet, I have let time steal many a precious moment from you and I. Many a magical moment that could have been, but never were.

Love is not enough, but being present with you, feeling you, knowing you, listening to you, connecting with you in all the ways that matter most like in the beginning is the magic you sought and need.

I let the days drain that magic away. I should have held on tighter, fought every day with my last breath for you in sustaining that enchantment.

Close to you is where I wish to be. Always

I am sorry I let time take that closeness.

It’s time to take it back.

By Philip Wardlow August 2nd , 2023