DAYS
Yesterday is great, yet today holds more promise than yesterday. Tomorrow is uncertain, but if there is tomorrow, it is easier to influence than yesterday. Don't say your days were better, greater. What future is that? You look at the past through rose-colored glasses. Men killed and died in your day just as in mine. Don't be selfish, trying to make yourself good. Nothing changes, as to men and angels. What hope can I find in your nostalgia? FRAGMENTS After Bob Dylan and Marcus Aurelius Time is a violent river with an overwhelming sway, and anything which enters there is brought to sight and swept away. Now I lack the disposition to re flect on every mistake. Like Adam, I endure the sins each of my sins in turn must make. Like wood chips from a fallen tree along the Struma passing by, memories drift throughout my brain like a canopy once held high. I have sacrificed the youngest men and the maidens to my gods; I have sunk the saving ships just to lower Strymon’s odds. So I can not heal the hurting I have caused by leaving for here; I cannot forgive my own sins, and my sorrow is too unclear. MO(U)RNING Not long ago, not often in my mind, my purpose was left unaccomplished; come now (I may), search fields to find what in my blind moments I missed. SUNSET The sun is setting, the cold is coming, but the falling sun shines with glorious radiance. A day is ending, a night is nearing, yet the night, to me, is nothing to be feared. My work is over, my time must answer, but I do not mourn because the sun helps show: To the day-lover, let no thoughts linger on shadows of night, for the sun rises afterward. WORKER POET Music in my veins, storytelling on my mind, I.T. my profession, my heart ever holds a pen, I am a Worker Poet. My mother bore me, and my parents, they raised me in the marvelous Ozarks, yet I moved away to find my own work, on my own, finding myself sat upon beaches, the ivory, shifting, Gulf sands of the Emerald Coast. By day, I am an I.T. Technician, bending my talent to the healthcare field, making hospitals my home away from home, much as my father, aunt, and wife do. By night, I bend myself over desks and write, scribbling, typing, and thinking. A Worker Poet, I call myself. Like a Worker Bee, toiling for family, I toil as my father and grandfathers taught, saying, “A man’s worth is measured by the quality of his labor beneath Adam’s Curse and a petty sun.” Warrior Poets of old philosophized and wrote of their roles and worlds. As a Worker Poet, I intend to do the same. Bio: Ethan McGuire is a writer and a healthcare cybersecurity professional whose criticism, essays, fiction, and poetry have appeared in Better than Starbucks, The Dispatch, Emerald Coast Review, Fevers of the Mind, and The New Verse News, among other publications. He lives with his wife and their daughter in the Florida Panhandle on the Gulf of Mexico. You can connect with him at TheFlummoxed.com
Fevers of the Mind 