Do people really have good feelings on

A New Year’s knocked down morning?  Writers say

We do and even poets say the dawn

Of yet another year improves the way

They feel.  There’s something wrong with all such folk.

One moment clicked along.  Another came.

One second clicked on clocks.  Men soak

Themselves in booze and then they wake, no shame

In drunkenness.  Dulled feelings they might have

Are muzzy, fuzzy at the best.   So?  So?

So what?  Fools grope for meds they hope will salve

Their hangovers.  Guys do not even know if they had sex with Joe.

  A new queers day is what it all might mean.

    They only know they’re feeling pukeygreen.

[Writing rules, including rules of sonnetry, are broken in this sonnet.  You can probably figure out why.]

~ Phillip Whidden 

Poet Paradox Pushes away Opposition

“Hold Infinity in the palm or your hand” ~ William Blake

The poets push ambivalence to truth.

They penetrate the contradictions, make

Them unified extremes.  Both age and youth

Conflate together.  Poets put the brake

On variance.  The color wheel points out

Each color’s complement.  The perfect blue

As azure points to yellow, but truth’s clout

Is caused in juxtaposing of the two.

The poets have been saying this—and more,

That blue and yellow are the same, are one

In essence, in divinity.  The core

Of truth is sapphire as a yellow sun.

..The peacock and the flaming phoenix glow

….As one and every other truth is faux.

[Coleridge says the poets’ modus operandi is “in the balance or reconciliation of opposite or discordant qualities; the sameness, with difference; of the general with the concrete; the idea, with the image; the individual with the representative; the sense of novelty and freshness, with old and familiar objects; a more than usual state of emotion with more than usual order.” Biographia Litteraria, XIV]

~ Phillip Whidden