Tag: depression

Poetry by Patrick Jennings
Read More
Burrard Iron Works, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada

Irony ~ Pic and a Word Challenge #289

I am having
High-order, ill-mannered thoughts
Inconvenient truths
As the saying goes

Understatement that it is

And I have always
Wondered why
Understatement
Doesn’t have a better word

Overstatement has
Hyperbole
Pointed overstatement
An extraordinary word

Understatement
Seems so…
Well
Understated

But I’m lying
Not about understatement
I cannot overstate it
I cannot be hyperbolic

About understatement or lying

But I digress
I dissociate
Because I am lying
About having these

Thoughts

I’m not having them
I mean that emphatically
Which is also a better word
Than understatement

And still I digress
Dissociate
Dis-associate
Because I also most emphatically

Do not want to have them

So I digress
Again
Diverge
Obsess about other thoughts

Any other thoughts
Or no thoughts at all
Even better
Any activity which annihilates

Thought

Television
Computer games
Hours-long arguments
On social media

Irony
Another great word
A device used properly
Only as a hammer on an anvil

I have arguments
About high-order, ill-mannered thoughts
To avoid thinking about
A particular set of high-order, ill-mannered thoughts

But I digress
From my digression
Which speaks to the power
Of dissociation

I dis-associate
From dissociation

But those thoughts
I don’t want to have
They want to be had
They want to be thought

And they’re knocking at the door
Pounding at it really
Against the big metal door
Protecting my consciousness

Like a hammer on an anvil

Even now
I am buttressing the door
Keeping it shut
As it reverberates

I desperately want
To turn on the telly
Play a game
Or open Facebook

Continue reading Irony ~ Pic and a Word Challenge #289
Poetry by Patrick Jennings
Read More
An Unknown Shore, Gold Beach, Oregon, United States of America

An Unknown Shore

I’ve washed up
On an unknown shore
Clear of the wreckage
From which I’d drifted
Alone on an empty sea

Bruised
Scarred
Burnt

But OK

I spit sand and salt
From my parched mouth

 
Thirst

Then

Hunger

 
But first
Reconnoiter 

So up now
Onto the roiling sea of dunes
With their smaller wavelets
Of grasses in the wind

From the tallest
Scan up and down the shore
Only waves of ocean and grass
And the tidal strip of sand between

 
No people
Or signs of habitation
Or even a trickle of water
Splitting the dunes
To join its salty objective

Inland
A barren of pines
Obscures whatever topography
Or structures
May be beyond

At the forward fringe
Where dunes meet forest

Thin
Scraggy
Scattered

Windswept trees become soon enough
A thickly boughed and wooded

Darkness

I sit for a while
In the rustle of wind and sun
Watch the gulls soar
As their caws echo
The chatter of thoughts
Playing out silently in my mind

Ideas without a tide
Or a beach to wash up on
Soaring on an unseen wind

I am adrift in a familiar peace
The pleasures of moments lived fully
On sun and sand excursions
Whether accompanied or
As preference sometimes won out
An adventure of solitude

Before long
The harsh admonishments
Of sun and wind take their toll
And while chewing my lip
In meandering thought
A chapped bit of it tears away
Leaving the taste of iron
The sting of revealed dermis

The elements have reduced my options
To an accommodation with mortality 

Move or die
Shade or die

I strike out
Into the pines
With a good deal more hope
Than the conditions call for
Confident 
That an unknown darkness
Has more to offer
Than the expanse of nothingness
I now know
Baking already
Under the intensity
Of a morning sun

Continue reading An Unknown Shore