From a Poet

January 24th, 2014

Arranging our lives into a schedule and setting goals for them is a pleasing venture in itself; our efforts are never so precise and our discipline never so honourable as when we have something to point to, turning our every day activities into an improvement of the self.  Ben Franklin set aside one day a week for study and personal improvement, and advised others to do the same; Coleridge offered three hours a day as fitting to the battle against time; but when we burn up the hours and carve into our days these affairs, the magic disappears; the struggle we once thought honourable now seems vain and doubt leaks into the mind.  Should we make a new schedule and set a new goal it would be just as pleasing, but there is always the lone question that asks us if we are cut out for that sort of life.  Apart from turning us on to patterns and appearances, the mind is far from logical in its understanding, so why then do we try to frame it?  There was a profound sage who s…

January 20th, 2014


Where does error exist?  When I look back upon the time I spend helplessly involved in myself, or with the cares and appeal of appearance, I find there still remains a deeper motivation to uphold that which I have been made aware of rather than clarify the reasons for which I have become used to it.  The ambiguity of reality is based upon a logic undeniably self-evident and uncontrollably suggestive to any situation wherein opinion exists: the way the world works is the way we work and the view is less extensive than we believe; what someone thinks of me I become, and what I of them they in time fulfill, but each are mutual and neither ahead nor behind, above or below, the other, and change is almost impossible.
Douglas Thornton

January 19th, 2014

That I have been insensible to my surroundings would concern me more if I did not overlook them with the sort of scrutiny similar to one who is in a position to let them go.  This mature reservation to be impressed by those things I was inept to rely upon, and take for word what had not been experienced, nor submitted to any critical evaluation, has brought forth a realization, that over some point in these last few months, my life has changed, and I am no longer the one I used to know.  Should I search no more and be content with this truth, though for most it would hardly be satisfactory, would nonetheless be a reason to stay on guard against the discriminations of my recent and melancholic error of loving poetry too much.
For I cannot help but see this as being much deplored, and forever in the wrong, until that moment the result coincides with the perfect expression of our reality, and all of our shortcomings and all of our insensitivities become a quick sigh of…

January 9th, 2014

All existing things change and we wonder what is real.  Is it what we see in front of us?  That which we believe?  That which is rare or incredible?  It is often that what seems to have the least reality ends up defining our sternest belief.  The exotic animal, a foreign landscape, anything that is outside of what we understand as normal, is to us the missing link for what is and should be.  Anything new, anything most recent in time, that is the truth by which the world must move; and though we do not prescribe to all of it, and in some cases prefer that which is old and ancient, there is nonetheless an indescribable desire for what is unique.  And yet it is only through this unique creativity that disdain comes from what is different--for reality, at last, is the recognition of what is outside of us, and there is the terrible misfortune that through all things we recognize ourselves.
Douglas Thornton