Scouting the Derp
We need a scout.
Someone with eyes for the derp.
Someone to run the arc of this rolling whirl’d,
looking hither and thither,
with eyes that switch-back from the blind spot…
…you know the one.
The one that confabulates.
The looking-hole that our brain fills in with what we think we know.
It just… makes stuff up. Fills in the blanks.
So you have to send someone askew.
Someone off the beaten path who can simply-see
through that scotoma-hole we all call home.
Someone who can detect the glitch in the system.
The truth in the blind spot.
So. The Poet is a mutation.
They pitter-patter between the bicameral,
in cyber-words both alive and clinging to irony,
because they see the binary conflict we’re in.
And the choice is this:
We are on the brink of falling-fatal to a heartless machine,
doing our duty as an ordinary-drone has-been…
OR…
we can be rising-raptured in an organic-mutation,
and in a few natural generations
we’d speak in a language of light,
of shadow sculpting time,
moving to a music only the heart can hear,
simply-sublime,
risen from the slime,
dancing without any fear.
Poets are imminently real-EYE-sed… and under-understood.
They look as if they remembered they’re partly surrounding Sky,
and partly the curvature of Sea,
and partly the silent, glittering tears of night in the stars that we see.
They’ve discovered the way of the whirl’d,
going ‘round and ‘round on the edge of space,
with the law of falling and the law of catching up,
outward-bound by an infinite-in grace.
They’re swelling in their hearts ‘til their eyes gleam
with new rays of possibility,
bent by their individuality.
A Poet is like a sphere…
his centre everywhere,
her circumference nowhere.
The sound a poet makes is the frisson,
the viscereality where heart and mind meet,
where inner sonics and ironics burst into song,
where all her miseries and desires belong,
but incomplete.
It’s a rhyme beyond reason,
the master of absurdity,
while truth and beauty spontaneously run around him in nudity.
And when a Poet lifts the veil, revealing reality,
we are ALL made greater by this feat!
Nature always sends us Visionaries, Poets, Mystics!
Mutations!
They take us to the next evolutionary level!
They are our visionaries… headed in a back-words direction.
But a Poet writes-hard… with soft-eyes.
To swell from the cocoon of his words so they fly
as moths… to your flame.
Listen.
We don’t light the fire.
We lift up a mirror…
and show you the coals-glowing in your eyes.
Copyright © Jerry Whalley | Year Posted 2025
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