Tag: 2024

We Humans

~ joanvinallcox ~ 2 Comments
Also Posted at https://joanvinallcox.substack.com/p/we-humans 
What matters most, after food and shelter,
is love: presence, listening, and being heard.
Family celebrations, holidays and anniversaries,
offer joy and, sometimes, the most exquisite
pain
with loss: death, estrangement, abandonment.

We humans flee pain and seek joy, hungry
even for artificial joy, artificial solace that
we eat, drink, and smoke.
The paradise of family and friends gathering
warms us, gives us joy, teaches us
our need for the richness of loving.

In the darkness of absence, in our aloneness,
we humans twist and turn
reluctantly facing the opportunity of recognizing
what we had, what we need, what we can seek:
the delight of trusted ones and hugging,
the warmth of knowing ourselves as human.
Image from a scarf from the Vancouver Art Gallery

Tangles

~ joanvinallcox ~ 1 Comment
a tangle of exposed roots
Like clothes tangled together
from the dryer
I twist and try to pull apart
confusing feelings.

Easier than clothes tangled
from the washer -
wrapped, locked, together
refusing.

The creature they clothe -
more worn,
more torn,
more tangled.

Trips

~ joanvinallcox ~ Leave a comment
Winter road at twilight
Leaf clad branches wave,
black against the grey light
of an approaching 
morning.

I am wound with words,
enchained and given wings, both.
Words wound, but no words, (silence),
wound more.

Grey monstrous ghosts lurk
beyond the edges of the map,
while winds blow me
away from my home.

My GPS, set to “No tolls, No highways”,
is failing,
circling me through
detours and closed roads.

I drive through fog,
alert only to the back-up beeping
of warnings 
and blockages.

This old sideroad,
formerly a highway,
might be allowing me to approach
a new morning.

Soul Mapping

~ joanvinallcox ~ Leave a comment
clouds, lake, light, dark,rosy at the horizon,

There rises from deep within me,
before thought, shaping feeling,
choices, sometimes words —
heart and gut desires

Sometimes I listen,
sometimes I hear,
sometimes I close my eyes
and plunge another way. 

The crest of a thought 
wakes me, warns me,
pulls me back onto the path
and towards the shape of my life.

In the Memetime

~ joanvinallcox ~ Leave a comment
Attempting a Kamala meme
PostEnlightenment: Unintended Consequences 

In my late middle age, I emigrated
from linear thought and paper
to the New World of meaning-making
- digital and screens -
and the dubious democracy 
of social media.

With the accents of logic and rhetoric
I spoke this new foreign language 
of tweets and memes,
aspiring to live the Technology Dream 
of  constant accessibility
to information and delusions.

(My grandfather told me 
before he was born 
no plane had flown, 
and before he died,
a man walked on the moon.)

The Great Generation saw movies, 
still shared pageants and singing,
but welcomed electric light, 
phones, radios, and tvs
into their homes, ----
steps towards this hive mind dance.