Ordinary Person

I have these strange ideas in my mind

which paint themselves on the canvas of my soul,

I then imbue the picture with a sense of despair

and project it as words on a page,

I don’t know where my notions originate –

maybe in an antechamber of a haunted house

where there is cracked wallpaper coated with dust,

they emerge like seven poltergeists, finding

their way to a mind only recently exorcised,

or perhaps they’re soldiers of inspiration with

breastplates of imagery, shields of wordplay

and helmets of idealism or realism

forming ranks in the subconsciousness

and then conquering the humdrum in the

consciousness with hurrahs! and masculine grunts,

or maybe they’re reflections of who I am,

or who I wish to be,

emerging from mirrors both real and imagined,

clawing their way out from the other side of the glass

and gnashing their teeth until I hear them,

or perhaps they’re from some other realm

where there are perfections of the vagueness

we perceive as reality here,

where there is an answer to death and a meaning

to birth,

where time isn’t measured in a series of ticks

because there is no becoming,

only the immutable now,

but since they fall like snowflakes to this realm,

I only capture a shard of their entirety

which my mind devours like a glutton

wolfing down waffles, before purging it out,

giving you a contaminated nugget

of poesy to chew on,

or maybe they’re from a common source

or a collective, artistic wellspring of thought

that lends the same light to every writer

who only alters the colour and misleads you

into believing you’re experiencing something new

like a magician manipulating you

with sleight of hand,

or perhaps they’re subliminal messages

I pick up when I read or watch TV,

which I reformat using metaphor and give you,

which you carry, making us all

carriers like mosquitoes laden with bacteria,

or maybe they’re messages from the future

sent to the mind by time-travelling telepathy,

the technology we’ll discover someday when we

perceive reality in innumerable dimensions,

and become greater than Doctor Manhattan,

when we’ll influence the poets of old using the

same thought transference for reasons they can’t fathom,

or perhaps they’re artificially manufactured by

mind-altering substances like alcohol, antihistamines, or

weed that I occasionally enjoy, and if deprived of these,

I’ll be without inspiration like a tumbledown

shack in the woods,

or maybe it’s libido that creates them and the burning

in my loin races to my mind like cocaine up a junkie’s nose

(I’m sure this will tickle the Freudians!)

or perhaps they’re from the void where

a big-bang of inspiration creates similes, allusions

and analogies, mirroring nature’s first throes,

or maybe they evolve from monosyllabic utterances into

something concrete while my mind acts like nature

and erases this and selects that,

or perhaps they’re the impulsive yang to my logical yin,

the Stygian Dionysian rebelling against the rigid Apollonian

like the turbulent sea crashing against the cliffs,

or maybe they’re amorphous, psychical chaos

creating a demented demon of an ego that

feeds itself by unleashing its rage and then seeking

your validation,

or perhaps they’re not real, and neither are we,

because like Elon Musk puts it, we’re living in
a simulation.

But irrespective of where my ideas come from

or what they are, I often wonder

if they’re bountiful harvest

or acid rain.