Black and White
Samuel Roberts 1954 (Fort Worth)
Now this chunky residue of mental concrete
Comes abruptly splashing down in a sea of nuance
Especially designed for me as a lesson in black and white.
It took time for me to get here, sober meditation and all,
But only a fraction of a second for it to all come undone.
I’m left asking myself just what choices I have left.
The mind is a prison, damp and grey, without any light,
Or recognition of the sun, but the wheels keep turning in
This stifling muck until it stalls, restless and unthinking.
And I ready myself a bound notebook, pen at the ready,
To scratch the clean paper with theories of my emotional state,
Writing the words, trying to connect what I cannot describe.
If this is what existence means then what is it that it doesn’t mean?
What isn’t it? The dogs keep barking without care, the birds,
Unaware of such a dilemma, get ready to fly.
I write my thoughts, draw my pictograms and get ready to say
The same old things that I do every day, accepting the distance
That suddenly seems pertinent and irrelevant at the same time.
Pertinent and irrelevant and black and white.
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Submitted by SamRoberts on March 15, 2021
Modified on March 05, 2023
- 1:00 min read
- 24 Views
Quick analysis:
Scheme | XXA XXX AXX XXX XXX XXX A |
---|---|
Closest metre | Iambic heptameter |
Characters | 1,076 |
Words | 200 |
Stanzas | 7 |
Stanza Lengths | 3, 3, 3, 3, 3, 3, 1 |
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"Black and White" Poetry.com. STANDS4 LLC, 2024. Web. 4 May 2024. <https://www.poetry.com/poem/63408/black-and-white>.
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