Divided Consciousness Nos. 1 and 2, Sonnets #339 and #340

Divided Consciousness No. 1, Sonnet #339

The stones think as though they are thought silence.
Ask the big guy and he'll mouth a nothing
He's sure will seem like astounding nonsense,
As if a pretty rock knew how to sing.
He assumes you will understand the sound,
At least that it was real, if not profound.
His minor lobe chatters like a mad bird,
Ideas made sentences like light made seen,
Each thought a secret of the grand absurd,
Pitched higher when it's noble or obscene.
They never speak or look at each other.
What an obfuscation that would create!
Each thought like second thought would obviate
The first, like Cain gunning down his brother.


Divided Consciousness No. 2, Sonnet #340

I, that insistent I, is all I am.
I have witnessed it from beyond idea,
When my senses didn't make any sense,
When I felt like stone, a virtual sham.
Drop me in the deepest chasm, a sea
Seven miles deep, when all is present tense
And the lights fracture color into eyes
And the tones of drumming drown in sighs.
It comes back on me, it all comes back,
Eternal replay of the last moment
Until there is no next second, all slack;
The next I of me will never be sent
Until I bang my head twice and collide
With myself and decide I haven't died.

Las Meninas (Diego Velázquez), Sonnet #328

We all had nothing but art on our walls.
Tapestries, paintings, were consolation
Against the cold air's infiltration.
We wore overcoats and our women shawls.
The richest of us had painters employed
To make idols of our wives and children,
And to depict us as the handsome men
We weren't before our youth could be destroyed.
We were lords! Little ladies in waiting
Were equally fit subjects for the oils,
The poor things, our little princesses' foils.
The fools felt loved asked to pose for painting.
I myself died, mistaken for a hart,
An arrow in my neck -- a work of art.

Note: Las Meninas translates as "The Ladies in Waiting."