We think by feeling. What is there to know? --Roethke

Eyes open
to an inward pull of personality—
imploding personalities, wanting singularity.
Facial muscles relax a contorted façade, blankly staring;
the mind retreats inside itself, gathering its bearing
becoming awake, alive and breathing with life,
living by feeling what it already knows to feel.

The mirror will reflect what the eyes expect
to see, behind each projection floats a daunting memory –
deep within the cortex to all memory, existing
in the periphery of individual waking perception,
as if a dream made real, but with deliberate deception:
so a body may feel what it sees of itself as reflection.

The light of the woken world casts a naïve reassurance
that what is perceived to be true real is in fact there
to be felt – like a waterfall, forever falling back upon itself,
making a kind of order in its cyclical simplicity—
all the things that we see in this world will reveal
that before my mind thinks, first it must feel.

11/10/2011

Posted on 11/10/2011
Copyright © 2024 Rob Littler