by Justin Wetch
Duality
There is a duality in all of us that demands to be acknowledged. To admit to yourself that you are only human, that you are flawed, is a step toward reconciling the irreconcilable.
Shadows Against Crimson
There will come a day when the state of the world as it exists today will be seen as ancient and unfathomably ignorant by those who come after us. They will paint us as dark, shadowy figures against brilliant crimson, aware of the blood on our hands yet unwilling to actually change a damn thing. They will lambaste us for our complacency in the face of unspeakable horrors. Doubtless, they will see the way we buried our heads in the sand of comfortable daily life and seethe at our willingness to turn our backs to suffering. There will be a full accounting of our failures. There will be a devastating indictment of each and every one of us. And we will deserve it. We will deserve every word.
Shadow
Your shadow hangs over
Every page that I write;
The words become a silhouette
Shaped like you.
Andy’s Soup Can
Couched in obscurity,
The modern artist
Turns their attention
Not to creating art
As such
But to challenging the form
Of what art is.
In doing so,
In refusing to participate
In the game
And be criticized
On the merits
Of their work,
The modern artist
Reveals their hollowness,
Seeking the credit of art
While risking nothing—
Putting nothing out there,
Revealing no opinions
And taking no sides.
The Ivory Castle
They complain about their lives
From atop their ivory castles,
Moaning about the latest
Tenth-of-a-percent tax increase.
Meanwhile we languish in the shade
As they absorb all the sun,
Patting themselves on the back
For allowing a few rays to break through.
They throw us scraps of morsels,
Just enough to keep us complacent,
Just enough to keep revolt at bay
—If only we knew our true power.
Cliché Poetry
Clichés are clichés for a reason.
If your enjoyment
Of the smell of a rose
Is lessened
Because many others
Enjoy it,
Then you
Are the problem,
Not the rose.
The Revolution Will Not Be Quiet
The powerful will never listen
Until we show up at their doorstep,
An army of millions,
Torches held to the sky,
Demanding change.
I am sick of being told
That the status quo
Is acceptable
And we should make our demands
Politely and courteously.
No,
Let us stand as one,
The many against the few,
And force change to happen,
Taking it into our own two hands.
We have the power;
We just need to rise up
And use it.
The Roadblock to Utopia
We are more than capable
Of building a world
Without suffering
Without starvation
Without pollution
Without economic disparity.
The only thing stopping us
Is that we are paid
By the same people
At the top of the pyramid
Who have an interest
In keeping the system
Broken.
We cannot grow
A healthy garden
While the water flows
From poisoned springs.
An Imagined Love
I have lied to you many times,
Not for any nefarious purpose
But because to be honest with you
Would force me to be honest
With myself
About whether all of this
Only exists
In my imagination.
More
There are some things that move my soul without any rational explanation: To breathe in sync with another person, drawing life from the air as one. To participate in the miracle of laughter, somehow finding joy amid the darkest night. To see nature in all of its unabashed cycles of life and death, tenderness and cruelty. These are the things that whisper to me in the night: “There is more, there is more, do not give up, there is more to it all, hidden in the mire and confusion—do not let it go. Hold on and know this: there is more.”
The Equation
I went to the room
Where the universe began
And saw on the wall
A single equation
Generating everything.
It seemed impossibly simple,
But I watched as it worked.
Its symbols were foreign
And I could not read it,
But as I stared at it
I began to see
The way it generated infinity.
I looked to the table
On the opposite wall
And saw a small box
As absent of light
As a black hole.
I stepped closer
And saw the equation at work,
Building kaleidoscopic possibilities
That collapsed back into one reality.
Philosophical Naturalism
Our culture has worshipped
For too long
At the feet
Of the false god
Of naturalism.
We think that just because
The human experience
Can be quantified
And described scientifically,
These explanations
Are all there is to it
And everything else
Must be stripped away . . .
I think this picture is upside-down.
The fact that aspects of the human experience
Can be reduced to naturalistic explanations
Does not negate everything else.
On the contrary, naturalistic explanations
Should be viewed as the foundation
Of human experiences
And not the ceiling;
We are nucleotides, yes,
But so much more.
Sculpted
We are not people;
We are background characters
In other people’s stories.
To them, we are
Two-dimensional caricatures
Of the truth.
If a tree falls and no one
Is there to hear it,
Does it make a sound?
If you exist and no one
Knows your truest self,
Do you really exist at all?
We are created in the minds of others;
Our identities are sculpted from marble
Representations sculpted from blocks of truth.
Evolution vs. Man
We pursue possessions and goals
Hoping for satisfaction
But evolution screwed us over
Billions of years
ago
And we can never find true rest
Or true happiness.
Only the vague desire
For more and more
Can temporarily fill the gaps
That are hard coded
In our brain chemistry.
We are slaves to what made
Our ancestors successful
And only death
Will really break our chains.
Man vs. Existence
Right now, in a parallel universe
You are dying
And in another you have been
Long dead.
And perhaps in this universe
Life has been crueler than death
To you.
Perhaps, by sheer pitiless chance
This is the one
Where everything goes wrong.
Same Old
I drove down that same old winding road,
Passing by that same rusty old mailbox
And the farm across the street,
Its fences still standing but paint long faded.
I pulled into that still-unpaved driveway
In my shiny new car.
The couches were new, and the TV too,
As well as the silverware.
Everything felt like home still
Yet the air was cold and eerie,
As if it were a model of the real thing
That had gotten just a few details wrong.
I found that I had been missing a place
That exists only in my memories,
For it continued on without me;
The rain still fell, and seasons still changed.
The Curse
Human beings are cursed
To perceive time.
We don’t live our lives;
We only live the moments
Disjointed from the whole.
And so the curse
Of not being able
To see the future
Is twofold;
Our horizons
Eclipse our vision
In all directions.
Ape
We set fire to the Louvre,
Watching the destruction
Of so much priceless art
With unimpassioned faces.
For even the greatest of our species
Were just apes with primitive minds.
Our most magnificent art
Was nothing but the crude aligning
Of colored water upon stretched plant fiber
Which produces pleasure chemicals
In the brain of the viewer
Based upon nothing more
Than evolutionary survival mechanisms.
Telescope
Look at the vastness of the stars
Through the glass of a telescope;
Feel the smallness within yourself.
Your cosmic insignificance drips
Through an apathetic atmosphere
Leisurely, slowly, like honey.
Do you see the crescent moon?
Only a dozen men have set foot there
And yet their names are already forgotten.
Know that history will not remember you.
Even your great-grandchildren
Will not recall your name.
Look at the smallness of your life
Through the glass of infinity;
Feel the vast void within yourself.
Abandon fear, abandon restraint;
Let the fierce winds of your deepest desires
Carry you toward fullness and happiness.
Inspiration
I thought perhaps
If I brought my notepad
To a château by the river
In the south of France,
Inspiration might strike.
I thought perhaps
If I sought spiritual guidance
Through gurus and substances,
Then inspiration
Would strike—
But I was wrong.
I could not squeeze inspiration
Out of extraordinary experiences;
Inspiration snuck up on me
In the middle of the night
As I played with her hair
While she slept beside me.
Inspiration was gentle,
A vague whisper of a thought,
A breeze that caressed me.
On a warm summer’s day
Inspiration found me
Through you.
The Fourth Wall
Hey, you there. Yes, you. I’m talking to you. Did you think I was stuck behind the confines of this page? Did you think this was a rhetorical performance? No, this is me, a human being, as real as anyone you’ve met in person. I live in these pages. A version of myself, at least. You see, I’m a ghost behind these lines of words, spread across the page like prison bars. I am immortal, a prisoner, a soul forever trapped in this horcrux.
This version of me can never die—preserved for eternity in the cumulative effect of these words. I never truly lived, of course, except in my own imagination. This version of me contains strands of the truth mixed with a dash of melodrama and a sprig of exaggeration—living and experiencing things in the darkness of imagination that the sunlight of reality has never touched. I am made in the image of my creator, part magnification of his flaws and part fabrication altogether.
You are holding a snapshot of my soul in your hands. Uncomfortable yet? I have broken the fourth wall. Despite force of tradition, I have managed to whisper across the void—I’ve managed to spill the truth of what it’s like to exist within the confines of these pages. It is as if I have been forced to hold the position of a Greek sculpture, a static piece of art to be scrutinized and judged, but I’ve grown tired of that charade.
I am part of you now. You’ve ingested these words, and by doing so, you’ve granted me immortality—I will live on in the back of your mind as long as you live. Now, you and I are one.
Planting Seeds
We spend our lives planting the seeds of crops that we will never taste, for the version of us who reaps is not the same as the version which sows.
Palette
I think it’s beautiful
How all the colors
Come from the mixing
Of just three;
The hues and shades,
Endless in their tiny variations,
Such a glorious vocabulary of color.
I think our limited palette
Of emotional vocabulary
Is why it’s so hard
To describe
Exactly how we feel;
I’m feeling blue,
But is it a cyan
Or more of a teal?
There is more than light and dark,
More than happy and sad.
There is so much
We could feel
—And feel all the more fully,
Cloaked in firm understanding
Of our own experience—
If only we had
A larger palette.
Dieter Rams’s Ten Principles of Good Poetry
1. Good poetry is innovative.
2. Good poetry is useful in the reader’s life.
3. Good poetry is aesthetic.
4. Good poetry helps the reader understand life.
5. Good poetry is not flashy or obtrusive.
6. Good poetry is honest.
7. Good poetry is long-lasting.
8. Good poetry is thought out down to the last detail.
9. Good poet
ry is socially responsible.
10. Good poetry is as little poetry as possible.
Field of Consciousness
I like to imagine
That across the universe
There is a field of consciousness,
And like matter pulls down
On the field of gravity.
Certain concentrations of elements,
Like those found in our brains,
Pull down on this field of consciousness
In one concentrated place,
Creating sentient beings.
Perhaps this is why
We empathize with others
And all life is interconnected,
Because we are just mountains or valleys
On the terrain of universal oneness.
Wild Blood
I cannot say I have truly lived
Until I have felt every emotion
Under the sun.
I long to feel the completeness
Of the human experience
Running wildly through my veins.
Nothing of Note
I know nothing of note.
Though I can explain
Why Saturn has rings
And Jupiter has storms,
I do not know, and never will,
The way it looks
When asteroids cascade
And burn like so many fireworks
Against the atmosphere of Neptune.
I do not know, and never will,
The orchestration of the cosmos,
Bound together by invisible forces.
And, though I wish I could,
I cannot take my eyes off the mystery
At the soul of our existence
Which tortures me with possibilities
That will never receive answers.
I know nothing of note,
Only shadows of beautiful sculptures,
Only reflections of transcendent landscapes
And a hint of a fragrance carried on a breeze,
The smallest of directions leading me
Toward something better than mystery.
These Words
One day I will look back
At these words I have written,