Writer, Musician, Poet, Academic
19 Nov 2019 Leave a comment
in Uncategorized Tags: bipolar disorder, competence, free verse, medication, poem, poetry, recovery, sadness, side effects
My mind returns to the sharpness
I used to have
My will returns to a strength
I used to feel
Subsequent to a med adjustment
And relief from soporific side effects
I feel a strange sadness
As I contemplate the former competence
I used to enjoy
And wonder, at my mature age, whether
To attempt to recapture
My former competence
Or to rest in the memory
Of what I used to be
In that strange sadness
25 Oct 2019 2 Comments
in Uncategorized Tags: bipolar disorder, bold, free verse, poem, poetry, psychotic episode, self, tough, weakness
He knew me before my confidence was
Crushed, bravado broken
Before my psychotic episode eroded
The self we both knew
He knew me when I was
Bold, brash, tough, and accomplished
We talked over a few days about good times
Performed a couple simple songs we used to play
He noticed me shaking, heard me fumble a few notes
Didn’t want to hear me narrate
The tragedy my episode was, is still
Doesn’t want to hear about me weak, my weaknesses
I don’t like it either
But as it’s me, I have to live with the narrative
Continue as best I can with
The awareness of what once was
What I once was
21 Oct 2019 1 Comment
in Uncategorized Tags: Apollonian, business, career, enamorado, free verse, isolation, loneliness, love, Nietzsche, poem, poetry, school, solitude
According to Nietzsche’s writing, my ideals would be called Apollonian
The Apollonian ideal according to which I live engenders
The isolation I have known
Sometimes despising it
Bare loneliness
Chasing learning, reading, practicing music, listening to music, writing
Pensive
All alone
Moving from one state to another
Across the borders of nations
Chasing schools, careers, saying goodbye
Assimilating the norms of new places
All alone, living alone, sleeping alone
Traveling alone—for business or edification, or it all
Times spent in solitude
Now enamored, in amour, estoy enamorado
Another soul in my solitude
Awakening love, awakened love, loving life, my life, the other
Loving even the Apollonian life I chose, choose still
In love with it all, enamorado de todo
20 Oct 2019 Leave a comment
in Uncategorized Tags: architecture, chord structure, free verse, harmony, Jazz, jazz club, music, musician, poem, poetry, tone, transportation
The jazz band transformed the narrow, ceramic-tiled club
They rearranged the ratio of people to sound to dark woodwork
The club’s architecture became the chord structures’ foundation to melody
The harmonic structure transported solos all the way up to the ceiling, blew the roof off
And into the sky, out to the streets, I imagined
I didn’t understand the people jabbering and blabbering through it
I stood rapt in the packed club, transported, transformed
Maybe the people had heard them before
(The trumpet was a fixture in town)
In the intense content, I, even I, was content after the two hours.
I noted that any given musician only,
Playing measures measured over time,
Time after time, would finally time out.
Variety shows the composition of the universe
Different faces, voices, combos, intonations
Render exquisite the transportation, the transformation
Of the architecture of a club’s tone, music and staff, vibe and patron
The very foundations—flying and buttressing the harmonic structure
Of one memorable evening
12 Oct 2019 Leave a comment
in Uncategorized Tags: age, awareness, contentedness, free verse, passion, poem, poetry, time, youth
But for one skill set
Bitterly lost from medical causes
But for my body’s vibrancy
Lost from age
I feel better and better in time’s passing
An ancient tree grows high and wide
I know heights, now
I never knew in youth
The breadth of my awareness
Expanded and expands still from youth’s constrictions
The young’s flash and intensity of passion
Have calmed, calming me, contenting my present
My measured gait is not due to decrepitude
I carry the weight of my awareness,
Thoughts, contentedness, purpose, perceptions
Measuring my stride through life
Enraptured in the valley-view of my past
The mysterious ascending current flowing toward my future
In the present’s contented, open mentation
16 Jul 2019 1 Comment
in Uncategorized Tags: free verse, panic, poetry, travel
Between hotel check-out and arrival home
I’m at my worst
There are too many forced choices
In a moment’s notice about
Things I don’t know, unfamiliar places
El-trains, subways, buses, airport gates
Streets, choices, now, act, move
Choose now
Loss of power—their seats, refreshments, served on their timetable
Uncertainty—it’s all in your own hands
Panic, decisions, and waiting
I’m not at my best faced with all this
15 Apr 2019 Leave a comment
in Uncategorized Tags: alienation, city, civilization, free verse, loneliness, moving, rural, self-knowledge, suburbia, tourism, travel
To answer my question
An Indigenous teacher
Once told me
If you know who you are
You will never be lonely
I didn’t understand
White, I grew up
In bland, blanched suburbia
Moved to
A small, rural town
We people were the entertainment
The gravitas
Friends
Porch sitting hours
Moved to
A hip, slick, cultured, sophisticated, city of universities
America’s Athens
Loneliness, assimilation, knowledge, alienation from self
Moved to
A wealthy, beach retirement town
Boredom, self-discovery, self-recovery
Toured foreign countries
Europe and the roots of Western Civilization
Meso-America, Maya
Tropical Island
I am
Wherever I go
I understand
03 Apr 2019 Leave a comment
in Uncategorized Tags: age, free verse, generation gap, signifiers, technology, youth
I could be his grandfather
So a peer relationship is likely not in the mix
Yet his expertise surpasses my own
An expertise I need
Technology
The bane of the aged
The bond of the ages
Generating the collaboration which is the extent of our bond
He declined money
Our signifiers differ significantly
So collaboration and my interest in the youth world
From the perspective of my so different world
So different signifiers
His life ahead of him, much of mine behind me
My crippling need of his expertise, coupled with his self-confidence
Technology
Will collaboration serve for a peer relationship
Our mutual interests
Our alliance uneasy
Our uneasy generation gap
01 Apr 2019 Leave a comment
in Uncategorized Tags: alone, church, drunkenness, existentialism, free verse, poetry, sacred community, sobriety, style, vogue
Existential isolation was
En vogue
When I was in school
(Probably still is)
To which I added drunken dissipation
Upon graduation I found sobriety
And was terribly alone
Outside the “we” program
Despising my loneliness
In an otherwise paradisaical climate
I no longer feel alone
Which begins with Carol and us
There is the small church
Sacred community
In a world that has no place for religion
Out of vogue
Trends
But I have Carol
I have the church
I have sacred community
Which means more than any trend
I live my own life
I pay the consequences, reap the rewards
And think very little about some social construct of vogue
24 Mar 2019 Leave a comment
in Uncategorized Tags: free verse, Mayans, the other world
We live in this world
The only one we know
We make arrangements
Build hopes, aspirations
Purchase goods
To fit our life here
In a world which is only leased to us, at best
For an unknown term
Certainly, some of our efforts in this world
Translate
To the other world
Certainly, much will not
“We come into the world, and we go out of the world”
The Mayans remember each morning
Certainly, we must provide for life here
Properly understood
David Fekete 