LITERARY NOOK: Simpatico Senescent Sonnets

Joey aka Pepe Batbon Connolly is a retired educator who taught in the CNMI, NOLA, and LVNV. He is a sonnet practitioner who enjoys stargazing.

ATROPHY ENTROPY APATHY SYMPATHY

A Querulous Quartet

Atrophy attacking my whims and whimsy

Entropy enveloping my old gray matter

Apathy approaches, my excuses are flimsy

Sympathy slows down, my thoughts sadder

Atrophy attacking my upper and lower limbs

Entropy enters all my nascent neural synapses

Apathy apparent as cognitive dissonance dims

Sympathy stutters, fools others then collapses

Atrophy accumulates in all of my body parts

Entropy evolves and erupts in my brain space

Apathy antagonizes thoughts in fits and starts

Sympathy survives this development just in case

Four ways of fumbling stumbling and still growing

When my spinning wheel stops no way of knowing.

Diurnal Dementia Dilemma

Asking – my senile dementia asks

Beeping – my brain blips and beeps

Creeping – my corpus callosum creeps

Tasking – I toddle through daily tasks

Demanding – my senile dementia demands

Eliminating – much forgetting and eliminating

Freeing – every now and then it frees

Commanding – thoughts common sense commands

Perpetuating – it slowly silently perpetuates

Flees – as memory of the task at hand flees

Gathering – thinking clearly no longer gathers

Killing – cobwebs that a senescent spider kills

Sometimes I forget to do my dirty dishes

My pen works on what my brain wishes.

N.B. These “senescent” sonnets are as close as I come to “stream of consciousness.”

Poetry.., William James coined the term which is close to the Buddhist idea of citta-santâna, or “stream of mind.” “The contents of the mind stream are very similar to what we understand as consciousness today. It’s a combination of information from our senses, influenced by our feelings, perceptions, and past knowledge.” Quote is from Practical Psychology, 2022. Sometimes I wake up with a word or phrase on my mind, ie. apathy and entropy, I write them down and some words related to them in my notebook. I come back to them or find them in a notebook weeks or months later and within 7 to 10 minutes I have a rough stream of consciousness sonnet about them. Revision and proofreading follow. Enjoy.

Joey aka Pepe Batbon Connolly