Tag Archives: mental health

Inquiring Minds, Poetry Work

The Mucky Muck

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Muckymcuk

The day’s
doldrums drone
on from dawn until
dusk and the mucky muck
lurks.

An insidious thing
the mucky muck,
pulling life out,
removing all
motivation for movement
as the spirit tries to escape
a maze never seemingly meant
to be solved.

With a thrum, thrum
insistence to be heard, the mucky muck lurks
skulking deep,
latched on like a
fat tick needing
to be pulled out,
cut out, or burned!

Mucky muck leave me be
For I swear, with
sword in hand
I will cut thee

And I will see you bleed, bleed, bleed

even ever as my blood

leaves me, running in rivulets

down and dripping off

the cufflinks of my sleeves

You then mucky muck will finally surely

be free of me.

by Philip Wardlow March 27th, 2023

GiFs for your Entertaiment, Inquiring Minds, Poetry Work

I know I won’t cry

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They say parents shouldn’t outlive their kids, but should an older brother outlive their younger?

Much like a parent, the older brother directs, and protects the course of the younger.

Unlike parents, the older brother can also be a partner, a fellow perpetrator of many a fun misdeed gone awry. That is where bonds lie deepest, where intimate secrets are kept and held between a kin closer than that of the mother or father.

Sharing of sins, and the punishment of those sins, sharing in the joys and adventures that is youth in its whole.

You share a core with that little brother that none may know. It’s unspoken but known to the bone between you two.

To the Bone.

It’s honored, it’s delicate. It’s something that always dwells.

So when you see your little brother, dismal and seemingly damned, fallen and fragile, raging against an unknown foe and miles from the place in him from where he was once was, you know.

Where in the core that you share, now only dwells despair, you weep, and you weep, and you weep in the silence where no sees, because a man doesn’t cry, they simply don’t.

You know you won’t cry as he lies in a casket, all dressed and prettied up. You know you won’t cry when other’s speak of him in passing or come up to you with a hug, and “I am sorry for your loss”

You know you won’t cry simply because you have already cried so much as bit by bit of your little brother was pulled from you, excised with a sharp knife, and put into a blender and pureed to mush.

By Philip Wardlow June 2021

Inquiring Minds, Poetry Work

The many flavors of little girl/boy lost

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Foot

Therapists say the core of us, from the defining moments of our youth, make up a great part of how we see ours lives throughout our whole existence through and into  our growing “adulthood”  until the day we die.

We all walk a path, and that path we walk  sprung up to meet us whether we know it or not. Some have found that magical path and place among the trees where they know peace and a solid foundation under their feet as they tread a world still alien.

Most are not so fortunate whether you think they are or not.

Some of us walk it in seeming surety, with one foot right after the other; having all the answers to life at our lips and the tips of fingertips based on what came before.  Those types outright scoff at times at those who don’t know all the answers or have it all together.  They can truly be arrogant bastards; ridiculing the “underclassmen”  saying they will never catch up.

((Secretly)) they know they do not know everything;  no matter what they say. I have to imagine, that need in itself, to have to be sure all the time; it must drive them mad when their world falls apart at not knowing the answers when push comes to shove in their lives.

I truly do feel sorry for some of them.  For I do believe that type of arrogance is needed in the world to get things done. Else many of us would be sitting on our hands saying woe is me and nothing else. But these types must pay the price at times when the chaos finds them in their own mind.  For no one must see them weak you know.

Others  of us walk in a  meandering, stumbling,  almost drunken course down a  path where our footing is anything but sure.   Always needing that tree to lean on,  or that bush off the road to vomit up our urges and failings behind.

Yet, still they walk, for their is a determination in their lives that drives their legs into motion. They are not comatose. They are not in a vegetative state. They breath, they exhale, and they bring in life and let it out in small amounts.  They evolve in their own course;  through the volitions of some inner or external force which they cannot place,  but it drives them, much like the arrogant ones above, that have already embraced a reality and be damned to anyone who stand in their way.

What else can they do in life but to try?  And besides, they can’t look weak ; not to the  arrogant ones that depend on them to prop them up from time to time when they speak.

Finally, there is that brow beaten soul. That lower than low. The one that goes home to sleep and sleep and dream and dream until the day has disappeared and night encapsulates and settles the debate of who has won that day,  life or him or her.

They will not choose to try again the next day nor the next.  Woe are they, to not even attempt. For that voice that once shouted has been muffled and thrown into a cage of the finest steel made.  Never to be let out, never to be fed or watered, but instead to let whither and die in a lonely cage bound with a strength they gave away.

All because they believed they reached some end.  Some place in their  life they could not rectify, or redeem. Never realizing life is impartial, life goes on.  So go on, life says go on, and don’t be afraid to look weak and go on.

Be that person you lied to yourself about that you told you could not be. This is a lesson for all three of you who walk the path you think you should.

See…the path before you.  Just let yourself  simply really truly see.

 

by Philip Wardlow 2016