Tag: time

Advent Calendar 2018

Advent Calendar – 2018: Day 12

Christopher Hickey2 Comments

Advent Calendar Day 12

“When We Were Immortal”

the sky is immortal
“Immortal Sky” © C.P. Hickey 2017

There was a time when we were immortal.

Fresh, brand new.

Born into youth.

Excited for lazy pleasures and long days.

Summer adventures,

Christmases.

Depending on the strength of the gods surrounding us.

We could do anything and seemed robust.

Time distorted the truth,

and aided in our fall.

What once defied the setting sun,

grew less with each passing year.

Until, finally the world swallowed the moments whole.

There was a time high on the mountain,

when living seemed forever.

It was remarkable, but short lived.

Today marks the bittersweet anniversary of my maternal Uncle Kevin’s death. He is sorely missed, and I do my best to honor his memory as much as I can. I’ve added some links below to other poems and posts related to him, that I’ve written in the last year. It think it only fitting that he makes the ProCrasstheNation 2018 Advent Calendar. When I think of an Advent Calendar, I think of looking forward to something, and now in a sense, looking back. There was a lot of mystery behind Uncle Kev’s doors. He was easy to know, but at times kept his cards close to the vest. Thinking fondly of the many ways in which he enriched my life. He lived a life of patience and tact, and used these talents to teach his young niece and nephew game theory, or as he called it “STRAGEDY” There is many a night when I look at an empty cribbage board and smile within the glow of the memory it brings forth. There are many gifts in life that we are lucky enough to receive, but it is entirely true, that the gift of time is the most precious. Kev gave us as much time as we needed or wanted. 

If you liked this post…perhaps these might appeal to you as well:  New England Giant, POEMVEMBER 2018-DAY 8: “A GIANT AMONG MEN”

, A REMEMBERANCE

Poems · poetry · video

“Windermere Plantigos”

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“Windermere Plantigos”

Abutting a frenzy of dancing air,

Petals and leaves propel themselves still.

Potted points of oxygen emissions.

Nature dovetails with man made structures.

Breaking left and right,

Aboveish and belowish.

Invisible force,

Much like gravity,

But not as omnipresent.

A delicious chill leaks down my back and puckers my cheeks.

The time of seasonal consistency approaches its end.

Onward to the new death,

And dying things.

That somehow make it their business to appear at a later time.

40/40 Poetry Project · Poems · poetry

40/40: Summer Poem Slam-a-bam! – Day 35 – “Ballad of the Pearl Street Ramblers”

Christopher Hickey1 Comment
Photo Courtesy of Dan Marcella – “Pearl St.” ©️ Dan Marcella 2018[[

“Ballad of The Pearl Street Ramblers”

I took a trip down memory lane,

To days in my rear view.

Now, none of us remain the same,

Life changed our point of view.

Those days, we saw the road ahead.

Certain, that we would win.

A future bright with no owed debt,

A treasure trove of sin.

We all hung out and busted balls,

All bastards to a T.

The Prescott schoolyard free-for-alls,

Still haunt my memory.

We lost a friend along the way.

In years there will be more.

Lifelong friendships? Who is to say,

How long they will endure?

Street corner kids just passing time,

Or time, just passed us by.

A passing thought of youthful prime,

Ends with a trailing sigh.

Of all the times both come and gone,

I will remember those.

Pearl Street Ramblers, Ramble On!

Until, we take repose.

A very special thanks to Jeff M, for threading the needle on this idea. The past is prologue, and full of both terror and hope. Our just desserts are awaiting for us, and the band plays on, or rambles on, as it were.

40/40: Summer Poem Slam-a-bam is a project in which people have joined me for 40 days and 40 nights of on-demand poetry. They have submitted the concepts, ideas, and subjects; I’ve done the work.

Poems

“In Search of…”

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“In Search of…”

 

Trading on complacency,

time’s drudgery wounds hope.

Lost in a busy department store,

parents on a different floor.

The escalator eats extremities,

nicked rubber handrails provide instabilities.

Watching step panels morph into disappearing ground.

An escape to the shoe store,

sitting with the clerk as the metal sizer finds the hole in a worn tube sock.

Folding space, a hypothetical method of interstellar travel.

Or, you could simply put your hands over your eyes and curl up fetal like.

Many people are gone before they leave.

General Musing

41 and not half done / 41 a number prime

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41

Yesterday, I celebrated my 41st Birthday. A heartfelt thank you to all the family, friends, strangers, and even enemies that wished me a happy birthday. There was an enormous response, and I felt the love. It is nice to hear from so many people. Especially, people so directly responsible for engaging me throughout my life and contributing to many dearly held memories.

As I mentioned in previous blogging years (this is my third blogging year) that I don’t feel particularly different, or older with each passing year. My sensibility still feels similar to, say, March 15, 2014, and even March 15, 1995. So where does the feeling or change of age come in?  I’m in no rush to find out in truth, albeit I have oh so many acquaintances and companions on this journey, that fall all over themselves to suggest that persons of my age, our age, are “getting old”.

Poppycock! Fiddlesticks! Blasphemers!

Denial? I don’t think so. Groupthink and small talk are fast friends, and I can hardly hold folks accountable for wanting to get out of most conversations as quickly as possibly. But, yes there is a but here: BUT, I don’t agree.

Time is relative, is it not? Granted we generally support a notion of linear time. But how I perceive time, is it not different than how you perceive time? There are a great many variables involved here, but I can’t bring myself to nod in assent every time someone throws Thor’s Hammer of resignation to chip away at my response to how I perceive time.

I get it. I, you, we are experiencing this adventure, perhaps similarly in many ways. However, I refuse to go gentle into that good night. Just like Dylan Thomas proposed, I’m raging against the dying of the light. Yes! I invoke the spirit of enthusiasm when staring down “Eventually”

Why the fa-nerk-ing hurry? I’ve just arrived here in this moment. Why shit all over it and concede that things will never be the same? It ain’t like it used to be.

Change from that moment to this moment to the next moment, that is where life lives. I love this moment. Right now.  It feels pretty good, in fact. I feel rather fortunate. My health is great, my family is great, and with an eye on being realistic within the frame of my own life, things are very damn near perfect.

If you want to converse freely on the passage of time and how it applies to your subjectivity, then that is one thing, but don’t pull me down into your pit of despair and suggest that we, you, I are getting old.

Simply: I live to live, and I don’t take measurements of time. Such measurements in an unhealthy mind only imperil our sense of mortality to the point that we live to despair what has gone and what is left, rather than what moment is living within us. Most importantly how we live within the moment we are living in right now.

This is my prime. 41, is a prime number, no shit. And next year, cleverness aside, 42 will be my prime, and here on until I no longer breathe the enthusiasm into my present moments that I now possess.

I simply suggest that our impermanence informs the importance with which we engage the string of moments that we live within from womb to tomb, and challenges us to herald all those moments as prime.

You think WE’RE getting old? Well, that is how you see it, isn’t it? I told a friend that I have not begun in years. I constantly reinvent who I am, how I see the world, and I am grateful for every damn moment. I simply think it’s okay for us to view it differently.  I only hope that folks don’t put too much weight on the journey diminishing as we progress, because that, in essence, is what causes it to diminish in the first place.

Remain young in heart, in spirit, in practice, in action. The only real progress in life is remaining happy within the only thing we truly can possess: the present.

Carpe Diem!

I love being in my prime. Linear time can suck a loaf out of my bread basket. I intend to prime it up for quite a while. 41, 42, 43…