A Thousand Lives

Posted byChico’s MomPosted inpoetry, UncategorizedTags:, , , ,

I have lived a thousand lives and soon the world will see what my heart has given in order to make me.

The whirlwind in my mind has focused its view. All but one life is blind which makes me very blue.

At night when my mind is asleep bits and pieces through my unconscious mind beam. In they creep, in the form of dreams.

Lives unknown to me, that I may never again see.

When I was in high school, this poem was published in ‘America at the Millennium: The Best Poems and Poets of the 20th Century’ The International Library of Poetry, poetry.com, page 51.

Today ends April and 2025’s poetry awareness month. Tomorrow I started a new story. 🫣

Published by Chico’s Mom

Thanks for visiting. My blog has lots of different styles: drawing, painting, photography, stories and poetry.

36 thoughts on “A Thousand Lives”

  4. I think it was unintentional but I love how you’re playing with time here. I just read Teddy by JD Salinger: “I grew my own body,” he said. “Nobody else did it for me. So if I grew it, I must have known how to grow it. Unconsciously at least. I may have lost the conscious knowledge of how to grow it sometime in the last few hundred thousand years, but the knowledge is still there, because—obviously—I’ve used it . . .”

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    1. I think we play with that a lot calling it deja vu. In Plato’s, Meno he thinks that we never learn anything. That we already know things. He uses a slave boy as his examples. He asked the boy a series of questions that the boy has never been exposed to but comes up with exceptional answers. Plato’s theory is that we already have within our souls the answers to such questions. Thus, arriving at the answers is a matter of retrieving them from within. We recognize them as correct when we confront them. (The “Aha!” erlebnis)

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  5. I love that take, and I think it’s correct. It’s very comforting, in a way. This is just one stop on our journey, you know?

    I believe time is linear, but our human perception/memory of it is a varied and misunderstood thing🙂

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    1. So much about us is misunderstood.

      People talk about going back in time. If only I could invent a Time Machine. Those types of things. I don’t believe time isn’t there to redefine or explore. Love watching me some Dr. Who but I think the same about the future. It’s this blank slate that we write as we go. We are erasing with one hand and writing with the other.

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      1. Yes, there’s a desire to change what is rather than a desire to fully explore where and what we are. It’s fantasy. I’m not sure it’s useful. I think we should concentrate on being in the present, and the things that are here for us. No matter how painful they sometimes are, there’s a beauty to be found in almost everything.

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  6. Exploring for the purpose of learning and understanding is good and right. Although it can be entertaining or even comforting to imagine changing the past (or future) to suit our own egos or personal beliefs-not so much.

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  9. I had to read down to confirm that you wrote the above poem, as it wasn’t quite clear in your description. Appreciated your comments re Plato and Meno as well. I agree, excellent poem. Ty for sharing.

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