By: Dominic Blanco
The Humboldt Park Field House overlooks
the lagoon where I stand. Another winter
coming on. Overhead, the Barn Swallows
enjoy one of the last few flights. The duck
in the cold water are emeralds missing
when the pool closes. Another season
and I am alone by fate, the withering
red and brown leaves like nostalgia’s ash
for Rachel, in that garden of my heart.
Another reminder when I see the fall
couples, captured into frames to be placed
near the bed of their middle-class homes.
Whatever is, is, I repeat. Reflection
is illusory. Love and ecstasy, what is
until it is not. Thinking of the Pre-Socratics,
feeling warmer with them. Parmenides
concerned with his poem. Building
a fire there, here in the present.
An emerging poet from Miami, Dom resides in Chicago. Where he has been in a tempestuous affair with poetry for the last 10 months. He has been accepted for publication by the The Raw Art Review. The piece titled: "The Ballad of the Brain in Winfield, Illinois" . Appearing in their Spring Journal on the 31st of this month.
"The Pre-Socratic Philosopher, Parmenides, held that the multiplicity of existing things, their changing forms and motion, are but an appearance of a single eternal reality. From this, it can be surmised that what we encounter through the senses cannot be of something beyond our experience. It was his principle that acted as the guide for “Whatever Is, Is”. For at the time I had completed a tempestuous relationship with the woman involved and grief had stricken me as a result. How could the intensity of what I perceived to be love be finished? All to say I had not been able to move on. But utilizing Parmenides philosophy, love was not a living thing. It had no appearance. And so my experience of love itself was null. Nor could existing things act as a vehicle for the reminder of my grief. I was thus left to the present moment, to existing things, the existence of my being alone and separate of what came before."