Category Archives: future

November 12, 2022 · 2:43 pm

Heart Tides – a poem by Paul Vincent Cannon

#2022 November PAD Chapbook Challenge

Day 12 12.11.22

Prompt: write a future poem.

Heart Tides

As mind's empires fade
the hope of hearts rise
past dystopian disjunctions,
where it is possible to breathe,
here the future becomes real
for the first time since fear,
since the sadness of endings,
which in this moment are transformed, 
becoming an urgency of hope without
abstraction, a glimpse of tomorrow,
something new,
hyperbole restrained,
nothing regurgitated,
no longer a field of dreams,
a field of tides,
turning where 
the conversation has begun.


Copyright 2022 ©Paul Vincent Cannon
All Rights Reserved ®️

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November 7, 2022 · 3:19 pm

I’m Not Kicking Back -a poem by Paul Vincent Cannon

#2022 November PAD Chapbook Challenge

Day 7 7.11.22

Prompt: Adaptation 

I'm Not Kicking Back

The future can no longer be held in the past,
no room for denial now
this drama is nonfiction,
times have changed,
my lawnmower has less employ
but I'm not kicking back,
not until my garden is water wised,
or my soap ceases to kill fish,
the templar in me crusades
against the plastic scourge 
that has evangelised my life.
Who would have thought
I'd be conserving water,
checking labels,
sorting bins,
reducing travel,
whatever it takes to reduce
my impact,
my footprint,
my legacy,
protecting sentient life
on this rare earth.
I can't undo the past,
but I can do the future,
I'm taking a darwinian line,
adapt or perish,
demise is not my game.


Copyright 2022 ©Paul Vincent Cannon
All Rights Reserved ®️

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December 6, 2021 · 3:14 pm

As If – a poem by Paul Vincent Cannon

Photo: pixabay.com

“Most people rust out due to lack of challenge.” Denis Waitley 

As If

Like Plato's bus, that rusted jalopy creaking along
the gray skies of future's neccessary critique
as the conspirators become disheartened by
the corrosion of reason, as if reason were itself.

The gray skies of future's necessary critique,
risking rebellion s reaction to the current crisis,
the corrosion of reason as if reason itself 
remotely capable of saving the past from the future.

Risking rebellion as reaction to the current crisis,
all those assumptions that paralyse our trust ,
remotely capable of saving the past from the future,
the inability to let go of our concrete delusions.

All those assumptions that paralyse our trust.
as the conspirators became  disheartened by
the inability to to let go of our concrete delusions,
like Plato's bus, that rusted jalopy creaking along.

Copyright 2021 ©Paul Vincent Cannon
All Rights Reserved ®

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November 25, 2021 · 3:12 pm

Dancing – a poem by Paul Vincent Cannon

Photo: found on pinterest.com

“But still, like dust, I’ll rise.” Maya Angelou

Dancing

The less used room full of stuff,
dry books and papers on a table,
curtains drawn even though it is
only afternoon and nowhere hot,
the sense that this room is always so
except for the chink where they meet.

There a shaft of piercing light
catches my eye, more for the
dancing dust on threads of sun
a nod to the surrender of life now
filling the scene before me, and I 
get to wondering, one day I too will
dance  on shafts of golden light.


Copyright 2021 ©Paul Vincent Cannon
All Rights Reserved ®

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November 6, 2021 · 2:51 pm

What Comes Next? – a poem by Paul Vincent Cannon

Photo: images.dailykos.com

“Any system that values profit over human life is a very dangerous one indeed.” Suzy Kassem 

What Comes Next?

Who welcomes the stranger at their door,
how sacred is this finite threshold of
interwoven beliefs hanging so thinly,
a bulwark against the damp demise,
reinforcing  our carefully curated fantasy,
which, like a paper bag in the rain,
causes us to dare consider its collapse 
into someone's reality, an insecure
subjectivity we might cling to as if
to a child eagerly seeking a parent 
in a sea of discordant confusion, 
something might make sense.


Copyright 2021 ©Paul Vincent Cannon
All Rights Reserved ®

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September 27, 2021 · 3:09 pm

Escaping – a poem by Paul Vincent Cannon

Image: mysticartdesign at pixabay.com

“Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.” Soren Kierkegaard

Escaping 

Things seem to be slowly unravelling in our time,
the long drawn out threads of a life collapsed,
disrupted by emergent disordered possibilities
calling us ever onwards beyond our antinomies.

The long drawn out threads of a life collapsed
could awaken us to a new vitality beyond despair,
calling us ever onwards beyond our antinomies,
past the catastrophic loneliness of sensibility.

Could awaken us to a new vitality beyond despair,
escaping the melancholia of the world's end,
past the catastrophic loneliness of sensibility,
onwards to the chaos of an improvised life.

Escaping the melancholia of the world's end,
disrupted by emergent disordered possibilities,
onwards to the chaos of an improvised life,
things seem to be slowly unravelling in our time.


Copyright 2021 ©Paul Vincent Cannon
All Rights Reserved ®

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August 27, 2021 · 3:40 pm

The Distance Grows Longer – a poem by Paul Vincent Cannon

Photo: pixabay.com

“Comfort zones, where your unrealised dreams are buried ….” Roy T. Bennett

The Distance Grows Longer

Do you know the distance I
have travelled the waters of life,
traversing the scattered fragments
of sheer ecstasy, the majesty of
risky ideas we imagined might
evolve to a reality attached to 
nothing but the energy of our
passions, which were strangely 
balanced against each other,
and the heart of these choices,
deeply buried in the trope of
things that could happen, but
might not, even though everything
matters, even when it doesn't,
and so, the distance grows longer.


Copyright 2021 ©Paul Vincent Cannon
All Rights Reserved ®

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April 16, 2021 · 2:11 pm

The Cost – a poem by Paul Vincent Cannon

Photo: Carol Cater, pixabay.com

“Consumerism is eating the future.” Andy Coghlan 

The Cost

The serpent of eden slithered into the
malls of life whispering songs of
inadequacy, songs of desire, and we
all sang those ego spirituals as 
earnest acolytes of self-deception,
seeking salvation in virginal blister
packs promising thirty seconds of
youthful orgasm at the cost of barren,
sterile soil and a pile of dead leaves,
leaving us with a fetish for auto
asphyxiation in a heavenly glaze.

©Paul Vincent Cannon

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January 5, 2021 · 2:53 pm

Opening – a poem by Paul Vincent Cannon

Image: Michael Gaida, pixabay.com

“I like the unreality of your mind; the whole thing is very splendid and voluptuous and absurd.” Virginia Woolf

Opening 

Opening the window wide
reality flew in like an albatross,
all flustered and no direction,
shattering all my pieces,
pretending to be something while
spectacularly embarrassing itself
with saturated deathly excuses
emptying from its smirking life,
and so completely removed,
"who's the dissociative now?"
I asked, as I closed the door on
my way out to creative futures.

©Paul Vincent Cannon

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December 22, 2020 · 10:34 am

Where Fish Swim – a poem by Paul Vincent Cannon

Image: found at psd-dude.com

“It’s pretty clear now that what looked like it might have been some kind of counterculture is, in reality, just the plain old chaos of undifferentiated chaos.” Jerry Garcia 

Where Fish Swim

Let's go from here and explore along
where fish swim through trees and
birds fly with ease deep underneath,
delighting in nightingale songs and
the loud silence of earthworms,
who alone can move mountains yet
go unnoticed though they are giants,
then fly a kite in a starfish bowl,
O how we mock ourselves under 
nature's forgiving gaze, that we could
even begin to imagine an ordered life,
where everything is inside out and
upside down and round again,
we must simply live into that one
electric, platypus moment knowing
that there is no other.

©Paul Vincent Cannon

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