Poem: It's about Time

Here it is April 7 and I have not written one poem during National Poetry Month.

I always feel that the best poets have developed their own private language that miraculously speaks to others. Perhaps that is one source of the following poem that I wrote a few months back with my Creative Writing class during our daily writing time.  I've revised it a bit.  I think it could use further exploration, but I allowed myself the type of repetition that I normally consider an indulgence. Maybe writing poetry is a little of an indulgence.  Part indulgence, part cry, part puzzle, part game, part creative act. The other day it occurred to me that within the overwhelming tide of dichotomies in our culture, perhaps poetry is at least one place where a person can still float an idea without having it jackknifed with ideology.

Anyway:


Conventionality

I am confined by my own language.

With language, freedom creates confinement and isolation.

The more unconfined by convention, the more isolated by incomprehension.

I have been confined by conventionality.

The unconventional in me has isolated me; my loneliness has been highly conventional.

The conventions of being unconventional are confining.

I am isolated by the inability to conform to the conventions of the unconventional.

My resistance to convention continues to confine me to the convention.

The institution is inclusive and isolating in its conventionality but

any subversion is in the conventional forms.

Subversion is convention; subversion isolates and confines.

Subversion reiterates convention.

The limits of language are convention.

The limits of experience are language.

The limits of experience are perception.

The limits of experience are the conventions of perception.

To achieve freedom we must shift perception.

To shift perception, we must shift language.

To shift language, we must shift convention.

Creating new conventions shifts reality.