Keep the Faith

While I write poetry quite often as a release of inner thoughts and tensions, poetry rarely expresses those thoughts and tensions accurately.  Many of the poems I have returned later to read, while they read well to me (most of the time), they do not convey the mood intended, as I consider how I have titled the poem.  Some of the poems are totally abstract, intentionally, and the title has very little to do with the content of the poem as written.

What, if anything, does this have to do with the topic stated in this article?  A lot.  Sometimes we don’t know exactly what is inside us, eating at us, making us feel the way we feel.  Logic seems to fade to emotionalistic evaluation and we never really get to the heart of the matter.  It is in these moments of confusion, or delusion, that most of my poetry is born.  I exhaust pure emotion, often over blowing it just to force it out of my system, so that I can get on to an honest, logical evaluation of the circumstances that gave the emotions birth in the first place.

In talking to people of all sorts, in all sorts of places, and from many different backgrounds, I have found a commonality of sorts in their thinking processes.  There aren’t too many people who really think without letting emotions dictate the direction of their thoughts.  In the western dating culture for instance, there is a prevailing tendency to use terms like “rebound” and “victim” when relationships fail.  Why is that?  Is it always necessary to project that someone is the villain; that wrong has actually taken place when someone decides to say “it’s over?”  The result of such thinking is hurt, and then people go on to “healing” (poor choice of words in such cases).  There is hurt in failed relationships, I’m not intending to say that there isn’t, what I am intending to say is that beyond the “I’m alone again” and “what happened??” hurt of it all, there should be some valuable discoveries made by both partners about themselves in the process that generally speaking, aren’t made.

The emotional rule over logical thought is, I think, clearly shown in how we view the present results and reasons behind the election of Sen. Obama, not to say that John McCain would have been a better choice, that’s not my point at all.  My point is that when listening to people talk about why they voted the way they did, or why they endorsed either candidate, the reasons I am hearing are almost always purely emotionally motivated by and large.  Very little emphasis is given to any factual information, no rational evaluation can be made at all of their decisions because they seem to be explained in terms of feelings rather than facts.