Doctor Grandma

I like to remember

the early days,

of riding around

with you in your car,

My body draped over yours

as you drive,

You talk of freedom

and change to come,

We plan our lives

and fall in love,

have no idea what lies head.

— The time I sneak into

your dorm room,

You cook us soup,

I stay the night,

We leave in early morning,

— Our wedding vows we write ourselves,

Gibran intermingled with happiness,

Yellow daisy stuck in your lapel,

and flowers in my hair,

The early days

When love began

Cement our hearts with memory,

Your hair long, flying in the wind,

No children, just the two of us,

We walk with friends, we plan, we dream our future

Which now becomes

our past.

cfblack                  04-10-2014

In the end,

perception is everything,

“Situations defined as real,

are real in their consequences.”

Perception is all that matters.

One professor

routinely fails his students.

It doesn’t matter if they fail,

because his class is required,

so they have to return

to his misperception

of what constitutes education,

again and again to graduate.

His tests are not open book.

The outside perception: He has control,

as he stands and lectures from his notes.

Students hate his classes,

but they always fill,

because they are required to graduate.

Another professor

befriends her students.

They sometimes fail, but she encourages all

to think deeply of life and their place in it.

She is more interested in critical thought,

than in meaningless memorization,

She knows the online classroom,

where all tests are open book,

and memorization does not define your grade.

Her classrooms are open discussion.

Her students are challenged to contemplate,

and think beyond what their parents taught them,

to other possibilities.

She insists on service, and application,

connecting theory with community.

The outside perception: She is too friendly,

and “does not have control” of her classroom.

The first professor’s status is set in stone,

the second does not get tenure.

Situations perceived as real,

are real in their consequences,

Perception is all that matters.

Late at night,

silence brings solitude,

as the world keeps turning

on toward morning,

while loved ones sleep

unaware,

Tiredness melts

into a false perception

of energy,

the body floats

in a sea of hyper-frenzied thoughts,

and I feel high

on life.

I try to accept

that people judged me

to be something I am not,

that their vision was so small,

that they knew me so little,

that they were so out of touch with who I am,

but it doesn’t help.

They know not a thing about me.

and when you give 500 percent,

and they throw you out like trash,

nothing makes any sense

anymore.

Idiots are free to roam the world

and take away the life

of others.

So you have to find a new way of understanding,

of coping with reality.

You have to know that when you get down to it,

there is only one who is in charge of your life,

your joy, and your place in the world,

and that is you.

So you just keep on giving,

forget your self,

and choose to be of service.

There is only One worth pleasing,

and there is always another day.

In God’s Own Time

God thinks differently than we do.

To Him, Time is not money,

It does not fly away when you’re having fun,

or have to be assessed

one day at a time,

Time is not of the essence,

because the essence of our lives is not measured

in minutes,

but rather in moments,

and what happened in them,

who we hurt, or who we loved

in each immeasurable instance.

Did we think we were the Cause,

or the conductor

of that energy?

Were we the Creator

or the Reflector

of the Sun?

In the eye of God,

Time does not advance,

and it certainly does not happen

as we want it to.

For us, minutes turn into hours,

turn into days, and years,

and we want things to happen in a certain length

of time,

There may be reasons unknown to us,

things we don’t see at the … time,

There may be something we have to learn,

and it may take a lifetime or more,

It may be a moment for someone else,

and we are not aware of it,

We are backed up in traffic

there is an accident ahead,

The person in the accident

may or may not make it,

depending on whether it is their time

to go,

We don’t know,

All we can do is move forward,

and not judge our lives by minutes on a clock,

but rather judge it by our  moments of compassion,

and the effort we put forth

with all our best intentions.

cfblack   11-23-2013