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Abstract Reality

A friend complained,”My girlfriend said I don’t listen when she talks, but in fact I do.”

“Reality is subjective.”  I replied.

So does everything else.  Someone had said life is fiction.  I didn’t understand what he meant at the time.  But in reality everything depends on the point of view.  If reality is abstract then everything is fiction.

It’s too scary to think culture, tradition and moral values are fictions that we love to drown ourselves in.  And to think that there are other “books” out there with different plots, that some of us will read them and come up with different sets of reality—no wonder the world is in constant conflicts.

It was a freeing moment for my friend.  He started to name:  time, space, measurements…things that we invent that seem so one dimensional and yet they are not.  How many facets are there in the looking glass?

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The Ineffable Job

A poet’s job is to dream.  To qualify, you must start by shedding earthly reality.  Only in dreaming does a poet write.  Even if one writes about the real world, it has to come from a place that is not.

Perhaps that is why taking drugs is favorable.  A little mushroom lets the mind go free into other dimensions.  Maybe drugs and alcohol are part of the job description.

To consciously dream without the aid of substance, to will oneself into a trance takes discipline.  It’s not an act of clearing the mind, rather, letting the mind wander upon a neuron and allow it to take you where it wants to go.  Many result in dead ends.  But invariably there is a path unlike all the others.  You’ll recognize it because it is energetic.  The poet must chronicle the journey in that instance by whatever means.  A poem is born.

When confronted by reality poets inevitably strike back, and sadly being mislabeled as lazy or weird or selfish.  Eyes glazed, body slumps over books, walking in circles, mumbling, disengaged in social settings—the poet is at work.  Do not disturb.

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