"The wise are not convinced by beauty’s gleam,
but purity revealed to them in time;
and hold the weight of deeds in high esteem,
for evidence outweighs a luster’s shine.
Per ounce of beauty in a pound of flesh,
fifteen of ugliness await their test."
#poem #poetry
seanpatrick.phd/2026/04/19/s...
regarding beauty,
there can be no consensus -
the world's ugliness
is self-similar, fractal,
but its beauty is unique
#tanka
the body remembers
what the mind
wants to forget –
beneath skin,
between bones,
you remain.
the pain of you
still pierces through
dull memory,
sharpened
by the passage
of time.
you are gone
and not gone.
all that persists
is the ache -
the nameless want
pulling, crushing,
unyielding.
#vss365
love is not written
and ink does not carry love
only promises
love is not a lettered thing
but a blank page to be filled
#tanka #TankaThursday
Some poems of mine appearing at alliteration.net (Forgotten Ground Regained Winter '26)
alliteration.net/poetry/defen...
alliteration.net/poetry/allit...
alliteration.net/poetry/engin...
"The vigilant must watch while Justice sleeps,
and on some distant day when she awakes
her sword will cleave through humankind’s mistakes –
but only those that observation keeps."
seanpatrick.phd/2026/01/25/s...
#poem #poetry
"The world is cold today, and bare;
and nothing sings beneath the sun,
and wind brings promises of snow.
Throughout it all, the urge to run:
to find some other place to go,
and hope to find some comfort there."
seanpatrick.phd/2026/01/23/m...
#poem #poetry
The weight of the world
would seem enough to overburden
the strongest bridge,
and at this crossing-point
we hear the creaking of supports
and protests of the trestles;
the beams all warp
beneath the load,
but remember
in the grip of gravity
even light must bend.
Dawn alone
may break.
#vss365
"A mind is not a weapon,
it is an ember in the night
that craves the warmth of others;
we sit and watch the shadows
projected by our fading light,
and celebrate the ash of gleaming."
seanpatrick.phd/2026/01/19/e...
#poem #poetry
"the day before, we watched the world boil over
and drip, and flare, and sputter
uselessly
and they were still alive,
and yesterday we might have done a thing
to keep them here,
but not today."
seanpatrick.phd/2026/01/17/t...
#poem #poetry
"I do not think that I shall miss the Earth,
and of its denizens I’d keep but one:
for you, I’d bear the misery of birth,
and in your being concede that God has won.
Regarding all the rest, I’m not so keen –
but you give purpose to the whole machine."
seanpatrick.phd/2026/01/11/s...
#sonnet #poem
when feeling you try to elicit,
it's best to be very explicit;
the unmissable truth
is too subtle, forsooth,
for plenty of folks who will miss it
#limerick #vss365
it should be clear by now
that life is a joke;
the setup and delivery are
immaculate,
it's just that we are waiting
for the punchline.
someday,
when it comes,
we'll greet God
in tears with laughter
and when He asks
what is so funny,
we'll say
"I guess you really would have had to be there."
#vss365
steam rising from soup
seeking equilibrium
as do we all. *slurp*
#haiku #DailyHaikuPrompt
paying attention (for Renée Nicole Good) I would hope (hope with gall in my heart, but hope regardless) that when a poet is ever doing the duty our minds have been summoned for— that is, paying attention, casting her patient eye along any scene and making sure its details are sorted somewhere for safekeeping, making sure there is some ordinary quality you can connect this to that stores it deep where you can no longer avoid it —that when that happens, on a rainy college bench or at a lonely coffeeshop table or in a shaft of light through rubble or in a driver’s seat catacorner from a theatre of terror or anywhere else, that someone else is doing what the verse summons of them: paying attention, crying out that it will not go unseen.
a poem that came spilling out today.
the space between things
an optical illusion
through the lens of time
#haiku #DailyHaikuPrompt
wandering slowly
and in the midst of monsters
through thick, blinding fog
brushing against the unknown
I met you, against all odds
#tanka #TankaThursday
...Yet here, with heavy-handed irony,
we’re made to mind the macro-lens.
The world is waiting, witnessing, revolving,
and here, we humans had our chance.
We may not make a move in time
to save our species; still the Earth
shall turn, and time will tell who lasts...
seanpatrick.phd/2026/01/07/a...
"Let all our expectations be forgot,
and let us love in instants now and ever:
and let each brief ephemeron of thought
unite we two, and past attachments sever.
Our history is of no consequence,
for love exists within the present tense."
seanpatrick.phd/2026/01/04/s...
#poem #poetry #sonnet
All or nothing, the true lover says, and that's the truth of it. My love will never die, he says. He claims eternity. And rightly. How can it die when it's life itself? What do we know of eternity but the glimpse we get of it when we enter in that bond?
"From many, few; who in that winnowing
may bear the lost when light, at last, arrives.
On winter morns, no quiet songbirds sing,
but silence cannot drown them in the spring."
seanpatrick.phd/2026/01/02/a...
#poem #poetry #villanelle
Woke up this morning still thinking about a book of poetry I read last night and still feeling a bit shook by it. The mark of a good book, I guess.
the world, when it reaches us
has been slathered in abstraction -
look there, an object,
a color,
a thing.
our brains shelter us
from the grim nature of reality
(which is chaos)
and swaddle us in
emotion:
"This is separate from that:
attend now to this,
which is love,
which is pain."
#vss365
Happy new year.
this world exists in reference;
nothing may be without someone to feel its touch,
the substance of the yet unseen
we speculate, project.
And we exist in consciousness,
in waking life and half-remembered dreams.
where does it go when we are done?
and in that sleep, what dreams may come?
#vss365
灰となる
この身と氷柱
春になる
Hai to naru
Kono mi to tsurara
Haru ni naru
It will turn into ash
This flesh and the icicles
Will turn into spring
#Haiku #Poetry #俳句 #詩
#DailyHaikuPrompt : Icicles
#Haikufeels : #ash
“The word must have been in the beginning a magic symbol, which the usury of Time wore out. The mission of the poet should be to restore to the word, at least in a partial way, its primitive and now secret force.”
-- Jorge Luis Borges (tr. by Alastair Reid)
the question is not
what the world wants from poets;
the world wants nothing,
poetry comes from the things
the poet wants from the world.
#tanka
the thing about light
is that no matter where you are
or what you are doing
it #travels at the same speed.
What must our world look like
to a speck of light?
A thing indifferent to motion,
a thread passing through
the fabric of reality;
unmoved by its grandeur,
undaunted by its horror.
#vss365
