A Poem On a Monday

You know that feeling you get when you look upon something with quiet purpose--maybe you're decompressing the chaos of your day by just sitting and looking at the sky--and you sense an answer or a connection somewhere in your chest but you just can't name it. Still, it feels right and so you keep on gazing. If I lived by the sea I would spend at least an hour every day just looking at it to see what that might mean. I get that same stirring feeling when I hear good music, and since coming off of 80/35 I thought I'd include a recent poem where I try to lock down that feeling.

Ghost Thoughts

There’s a certain blinking wick of yellow when the sun

sighs a tree—a same kind of light that occurs

anywhere else in the world. Everywhere the same

but the eyes that see it. I don’t know anything

but the ticks of my body. And sometimes, the sense of an idea

attached to my chest trying to claw its way out,

trying to ascribe words to the whisper

in the back of my throat before it passes.

But it’s already known up there in the light of tree tops—

no wonder we gaze so hard and so long as if it will speak,

as if somewhere in the void between our bodies

and a great height is a singular air. We look

at oceans and stars and mountains and light in the trees

as if they sing the tune of our hearts that speak in tongues.

A sort of music that draws out the grey of our thoughts

like salt in a broth. The questions no longer matter.

All that is hidden even to our own minds finds

a way out of the basement stairways under tall roofs,

from rooms where the windows’ only view is ankles

and worn shoes. Go on looking—that’s you,

unborrowed of intention.

Casey Lord