Mind of Moog

 I was fortunate to have been able to interview the amazing poet and philosopher, Troy Jollimore for Adroit Journal!  https://theadroitjournal.org/2022/03/09/a-conversation-with-troy-jollimore/

Song of a pan flute whispering in the forest Reaches me at a bend in the stream; Now, the sun's gently sinking beams are purest, While melody floats over me like a dream.

Once fire was naught but burning. Abstraction found it capable of holding. Through reduction, man sought new control, unmindful of the weight upon his soul; And it was then that the gods absconded, to roost in Olympian obscurity. Abstraction bound Prometheus to his rock, endlessly devoured by a world made recurrent.

Nature is one great forgetting and remembering scythe harvesting and sowing simultaneously.   Force rising through absence, overfilling and disappearing at once.   Yet the business of reality remains recollection of life from memory.   Longing for presence and seeking the past, the human present never seems to last.  

 A human being is content searching for form.  My spirit flows away from me, reaching back to this Earth, returns to me anew, a force of Becoming. I am a river that ebbs and flows. ME crashing into NOT-ME, just as this world is eternally unrestful, always at war with itself. Constant movement presses us toward the present; we are carried onward, but we may clutch about in fright, lurching forward or retreating into memory. These are the integrations of a tumultuous mind: thinking that it is,  needing to be, yet becoming something unfamiliar.

Poetry is defined less by opacity than by negative capacity.   Things remotely intonated have the reader’s eyes awaited;   like Perseus with his mirrored shield, a reader may see what cannot be revealed.   Some say it has all been said before, yet poetry wishes to impart more;   one poem: the same, but each time new, because of all that we’ve been through.

What is Liberty, if not a sacrifice made willingly against its enemies, domestic and overseas; as an individual, in spite of war and disease, to stand bold like Pericles, saying where there is a people, a conjoined will, there is a country? A human sacrifice made generationally, against tyranny, fought heretically,  against the majority. The unity within a democracy must be individuality.

 What action wrongs if it is right? An arrow travels straight through night, until it passes out of sight. As distance grows, so does my fright.

It is easier to account for lost time than action; what was not done exists nowhere. Only in the present, doubts linger, gesturing toward what was not, but might have been otherwise.

Ambiguous light falls upon an unsuspecting hour. Memory, that silver star, refuses her curtain calls. I am enchanted by a spiral stairway— shadow play before and beneath it— and a single candle.