SPOTLIGHT: New Days by John Drudge

John Drudge is the poet as social worker. John writes, “pain will always pursue us” preventing us from knowing our true selves, and our higher purpose. These poems confront the reader with the certainty that many are running from damaged pasts and find no comfort in nostalgia. Nor is the hope for a better tomorrow served by clinging to idealistic fantasies. Beauty may be found in this world, by those with the courage to accept reality, and the capacity for honesty. For those willing to seek the good in this world, there are New Days ahead.

– Jason O’Toole, Poet and author of Soulless Heavens and Spear of Stars.

Judgement Days

We are rudderless
And lost beyond
The bounds of religion
Soulless and sterile
Impertinent to judgement
Cold rolled fragments
Of modern intoleration
Where the sickness
Is internal
And we must heal ourselves
Before we can heal
The outside world
A contagion
Of disintegration
A metamorphosis of the gods
Quiet and repentant
On the path
That leads us home

Beyond Simplicity

Dismantling loyalties
And attachments
To ideas
To find the candor
Buried in our privilege
A failure of vision
And compassion
Dismissive
And deconstructive
Emblazoned with hate
And false morality
Both wrong and right
In the illusions
Of our truth

Toy Boats

On a tilted chair
In the Luxembourg gardens
Beneath the chestnut trees
With my dreams
Playing out
Under the cotton-ball clouds
Of a mid-day sky
I longed for her
To come to me
Like a faint wind
Gently rocking
The lone toy boat
Marooned on the pond
And long forgotten
In the cerebral stillness
Of a stagnant summer day
Next to the pretty street
Who’s name
I’ve long forgotten

A Slow Roll

Into this
Creaturely existence
We are subsumed
By fright
Divided
By Arrogance
And tapped down
By the eternal struggles
Of an ancient morality
A slow steam train
Rumbling down
The railway line
Through the instances
Of small changes
And the long hibernations
Of our courage
Gathering speed
On faint hope
Like ripples in the mud

We are our Mistakes

I remember
Those times
That defined us
I remember
The mean clouds
That barked black
Upon the summer’s
Fading light
And nipped at our heels
As we retreated
Into timid shelters
And I remember
When you came to me
Broken
And wrapped
In forgotten dreams
To make
New mistakes
In a messy world

Prime

Objectivity is a lie
And everything
Is subjective
It is the heart
That beats the beat
Of distance
Between us
Far away
From the breathing
That creates us

Pound Foolish

In for a penny
In for a pound
Round and round
In blind ambition
An eye for an eye
And begone
Nation states
In perpetual motion
A clash of ideals
In a mad consumption
Of ideology
Locked in dance step
To the suffering tune
Of childish sorrow
With one world
Silently waiting
On the ever flinching
Horizon
Of tomorrow’s
Quiet lament
And eternity’s
Last desire