Poetry by D. Summerfield

David Summerfield graduated from Frostburg State College, Maryland. He has been a columnist, contributor to, and editor of various publications within his home state of West Virginia. His work has appeared in Door Is A Jar Literary Magazine, Carmina Magazine, The Rye Whiskey Review, and El Portal (EUNM) Literary Journal.

PREDICTIVE

He wanted to do something positive
About things which disturbed him
Rather than just complain about them
Rather than say he didn’t care about them
So he set out to determine what it was
Disturbed him most from micro to macro
As this should not be difficult
For there were many things which disturbed him
And once identified, these things which had disturbed him most
He would then have to determine if he had any power to affect them
In some positive way
And if he determined he had any power at all
To affect these things in some positive way which had so disturbed him
He would need further to determine how to accomplish
What needed to be done to affect these things in some positive way
Which had so disturbed him
Or finally could he not just ask himself
Whether any of these things meant anything at all
In the grand scheme of things
And was there any reason to care about these things
Or to do something about them at all
When he could simply just choose to ignore them
Or just as simply complain about them

VISIONARY

No light shone into the fog of night to warn of a rocky jagged coastline
Just as no voice pierced the silence of day
To give you direction toward safe harbor
But you would not have heeded it
You only hungered for yet another lover and then another
Desire was an intellectual process and motivation a tabletop exercise to prepare
You for the results you never got
Existential was your calling card your flashing billboard to the patrons
In the barroom you thought could never be as smart as you
It was important they recognize how smart you were
So they could admire you for your smartness
And perhaps buy you another drink because in all your smartness
You were broke but rich in petty fears, dread, and anxiety
Teetering on the brink hoping one good patron
Might give you a shove
Inductive observations led you to a general principle that was always wrong
If something was something then something couldn’t be something else
Another lie is what something really was
Pressure mounted to self-medicate but the pain was still there
You were trapped in expecting different results from the same thing
Your instinct and not any conscious thought tried to tell you something
But it was only your intuition
Tethered to the anvil of your rational mind your eyes having deceived you
You stayed at ground zero
Refusing to know the heights you could have risen to

From the Editor:

We hope that readers receive In Parentheses as a medium through which the evolution of human thought can be appreciated, nurtured and precipitated. It will present a dynamo of artistic expression, journalism, informal analysis of our daily world, entertainment of ideas considered lofty and criticism of today’s popular culture. The featured content does not follow any specific ideology except for that of intellectual expansion of the masses.

Founded in late 2011, In Parentheses prides itself upon analysis of the current condition of intelligence in the minds of these young people, and building a hypothesis for one looming question: what comes after Post-Modernism?

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