What's the Matter With Me?

Don't remind me. But yes, it's up, and yes, I know what I said . . . .
For those new to this blog, I had previously begged for at least two weeks to finish a poem, and here I am finishing the poems before one week is even up, and Jean, you should take your time and use the three weeks to write your poem.

I guess this is because, for one, the topic is compelling and gets the juices flowing and the mouth salivating. Another thing is that school is ending and there is added pressure to clear the table. What also helped is that the sermon that I heard in church the week before, talked about the three poisons in life and made me want to write about them. However, I had to do some big-time manipulation, because Ann's poem ended with "Nurses, doctors, and staff continue with their work."

But I wanted to talk about the three poisons! Being that I had my mind set on this idea, I looked at the lines above that and took something from the dialogue instead of the stage directions. The words I needed? "Strong Values." I thought this was useable. They would fit the bill in a perverted way, and that is how I began writing my poem. At first, I talked about the greed for land and wealth and power, but that sounded flat and dull so I changed the list. I then talked about the anger at the locals by the white community for the so-called rape of Thalia Massey,( a white woman for God's sake!). For the last part, about ignorance, I changed the stance a bit and made it more general, thinking of all peoples in their prejudices, their religion, their communities.

In the writing of the poem, I didn't use caps except for the name of the Buddha because the concept of the three poisons comes from him. It just felt that it made sense to do it that way. In posting the poem, I wanted to the indentation to be different, but after I posted it, I guess it reads okay. Please feel free to comment and let me/us know what you think about the poems.

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  1. Pleopard says:

    I love your poems! the incorporation of Buddha seems natural yet I would not have made that leap. I guess that's why it's good to have different minds, it can reflect different lights and illuminate different shadows.

    I don't seem to have any pre-ideas about the upcoming poems so hard to prepare, but I guess that's the whole point.

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