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A Ghostly Surveillance for Floccinaucinihilpilification

Sound asleep
Or so I thought,
Until right then when
I was brought awake and shaken,

Stirred. It was like cold lightning,
A chilling surprise
When I saw a phantasm
Before my eyes.

An austere spectre
Gazing at me
Reached into my bleary soul,
Addressing and assessing all of

All that was me. And in a second
It fused with the all, the all of me.
Part to whole, we were all,
My being became synecdoche.

It was like a paramour
Inside me, incandescent, searching,
Finding all the chinks
In my soul-china.

“I got that one
From my mother's mother,”
I told it, wearily.
Years had passed, maybe twenty.

It stopped looking at the pieces
Shelved on my life-hutch.
This ghost dug in deeper,
Like a tick with pride.

It grabbed the wheel.
Swerving this way,
Veering that, looking
For all my alley cats now.

It found the reigns
Inside my bones
And cantered toward
That softer place.

That space where struggle
Comes to rest
And in me that vision
It said its prayers.

“Hallelujah,” it whispered
In me, quietly, peacefully in awe.
For it found a flaw
Behind all my chamber doors.

And on its
Wispy knees it cried, “She is human.
After all. And maybe there's still something
Something here.” Casting out, reeling in,

It fished in my
Heart-sea and caught that
Meaning was in vogue.
And then, with respectful reticence

Left my abode.

This esoteric experience
Wrung me dry,
And in somnolence
Both ghost and I fell

Back to sleep.
Only to wake
Again and again,
Hallelujah.

--

Mad Words List 5.29.18


Veer
Incandescent
Bleary
Chink
Swerved
Austere
Canter
Phantasm / Phantasmagorical
Spectre
Vogue
Paramour
Synecdoche
Esoteric
Floccinaucinihilipilification
Somnolence

--

A few thoughts on this one today. In the first one is about tempo. When you're writing poetry, there's a lot that plays into how fast or slow the poem is read. The line structure, your word choices and use of assonance and consonance, punctuation, and even meter if you choose to use one. For some reason I wanted to write a faster poem today and so I chose shorter lines.

Anytime I think of fast-written poetry, I think of Edgar Allan Poe. His ways of getting a line to flow with a fast current is fairly well done in my opinion and his works always seem to have a rhythm that is memorable.

Secondly this poem reaches back to the themes of Toward Harmonia. Of meaning, of purpose, and introspection. But also how it's very human to be flawed. Flaws are almost something that, without them, life would cease to move. Our ability to see flaws and work towards something better encourages change. And sometimes we need to change to survive (being able to understand that something is wrong or dangerous has helped keep humans alive more than we like to admit to an extent) or to learn something about ourselves as human beings. But it's important not to get hung up on flaws as bad things but to look at them as room to grow. So with each new day we find new ways to overcome and if we allow this ghost to represent the past or introspection, let it see and let it rest. There is purpose in who you uniquely are and what you personally do, and it's something to keep you going.

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