Biography
Abstract painter and sometime poet, former banker and tech-writer learning to live with a schizoaffective disorder that threw me "off track" a decade ago. My poems examine the struggle to assign value and meaning to experience and the challenge of asserting one's self as a flesh and blood human in a time that has reduced us to blips, quips and bytes.
Samples
This Moment is Already as Lost as the Past The past, you tell me, must be viewed with suspision. How can I show you all mathematics is addition? Take for instance the Buddha: He sat beneath the lotus tree for 40 days, sustained only by its dew. Do you see that you should be still? That the drink of life should be taken slowly? Meanwhile, elsewhere, Jesus said "I thirst." But back to the Buddha: He sat. He never drank enough in as short a time to even have to get up and take a leak. Meanwhile, elsewhere, Jesus rose from the dead. So, The Buddha sat and Jesus rose. No one I know has been able to do either of these things in quite the manner demonstrated by these two men. But so many extraordinary phenonama have only one known example I suppose. But Back to the Buddha: He sat for 40 years and he must have missed so much! His children growing up and his parents getting older and his wife being evicted, maybe, because he missed so many mortgage payments. He missed friends falling in love and raising children and coming and going and growing older and He sat. He sat for 4,000 years and he missed: The beginning of the universe. The rise and fall of many nations. The great world wars. The only award I recieved throughout grade school. The day I bought my first car -- at a yard sale. The night I lost my virginity (but so, to be fair, did the only man whom I would have wanted to join me for the occassion). To continue the list: The American Revolution The French Revolution Pop-rocks Pudding Pops Pet Rocks The end of the universe. He sat. And he missed nothing. No pain, no loss that wasn't his to suffer. He was present for all events beginning to end. Do you see that you should be still? That to drink is to thirst, to eat to hunger, to love to lose and that to want is to grieve? Do you not see? Do you even insist one must have eyes to see? Meanwhile, elsewhere, Jesus bleeds. Transferable Skills (A poem to an internet "crush") This gift is not made with the best of all intentions. I am not a good-natured physician. Unwilling to endure another "Hug," a word of encouragement, the kind baritone presented in cut-off jeans The slow light I hearwhen I read your dreams I drunkenly message you that I must wrest my heart from its chest and beg you to let me send it Wrapped in brown paper. This work is not written as a perscription for comfort or healing but still with Hope That one day in passing it by you will think "I really should take that thing down." And as you reach, I hope a flux of though flusters you -- a jumble of the day's concerns but in Red Yellow Orange Blue and Some kind of purple? And I hope that in this brief confusion you make some small irreparable damage to the canvas. This is my work. My gift to all its patients.
All poems are copyright of the originating author. Permission must be obtained before using or performing others' poems.
Blog entries by J.D. Andrew
Transferable Skills (a poem for an internet "crush") (18/09/2021)
This Moment is Already as Lost as the Past (18/09/2021)
Blog link: https://www.writeoutloud.net/blogs/jdandrew
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