Are you one of the Blessed or a Watcher?

 

Are you one of the Blessed or a Watcher?

(A lone voice whispers)

Precious are those blessed to write—to help carry the blind into the light.

To feel and see new visceral sights—as their inner television starts burning bright.

(C) Copyright John Duffy 

A poem exploring whether writers are like conduits. Where they see first, feel first, and suffer or ignite first, so others can follow. 

Suggesting that writing becomes an act of illumination—turning inner images into shared light—helping readers understand themselves and the world more clearly.

Implying writing is not just art; it’s a calling.

And vision—once ignited—is meant to be shared.

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Sorrow

 

A vivid, honest meditation on why grief hurts so much—because it proves something meaningful once existed.

Because sorrow comes in many forms.

Sometimes like a devious thief in the night.

A kleptomaniac who'll impulsively steal joy for pain.

From parents

Lovers.

To children.

Friends and family.

Have you heard him casually whisper your name?

Title.

Sorrow.

(Mr. Grief whispers)

Do you want to experience real devastating pain?

Then fall in love with someone incredible and let me break you down.

Again and again.

From birth until death.

When you wake up one day and only you and sweet memories suddenly remain.

(C)

Copyright John Duffy 

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Creativity

 Someone asked how do I create these monologues? 

For that's all they are.

Whispers in the silence.

And so I always answer.

"Can they be what the mind hears or sees / When it leaves the spectrum of light.

To enter into deep dreams.

No one can believe / Unless it's written in seas of fonts / Blowing in a gentle poetic breeze?"

A piece exploring where creativity sometimes comes from - A place beyond conscious control.

A place where the mind hears when it stops looking - to translate dreams into language: 

So others on their own patrol can believe in what it experiences beyond the laws of averages.

(C)

Copyright John Duffy 

Consecrated Dreams. The First Time.

 

Consecrated Dreams

(A lone voice whispers)

I can always remember the first moment of total bewitchery.

When Love climbed, like an invisible ghost, into the very deep depths of me.

From dark shadows hidden behind Aphrodite's crimson tree.

Because my life changed forever that night with its first delivery.

To be haunted into old age with my first taste of its dark mysteries.

(C)

Copyright John Duffy 

A poem about first love as a powerful, sacred initiation—a consecration. 

A union entwined with depth and feeling but also cursed with memory and haunting.

A haunting where Love is not portrayed as gentle salvation but as an incredible force that reshapes identity forever.

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Oracle of Necromanteion.

 

A poem about spiritual survival exploring whether losing faith (in anything) opens you to inner darkness.

Where temptation and despair work quietly in isolation, hardening the heart.

But it also promises that virtue is a choice, not a rule, and belief can be personal.

Suffering can be crossed.

Transformation is possible, and if you choose rightly, you don’t just survive.

You get to run again.

Title.

 The Oracle of Necromanteion.

(A lone voice whispers)

He who walks without the most holy of ways will never return.

Until they have learned not by sin be swayed.

As true as new trees are made.

By lay played.

In so many wet, insidious ways.

By those hidden in the chasms.

In the faraway stars.

For people like you gathered here today. Should be careful.

For without faith.

In any form.

The nearby Darkness can always open a small gateway to sin.

And if that abyss is opened.

Revealing Desolation's fatal sandstorms.

It gets so much harder to let hope crawl in.

So, O'Ye. O'Ye.

On the yellow beaches.

Beseeching.

O 'Ye Gathered round me.

To the worthy few.

I summon by the power of the Purple Flame.

Virtue.

By the Divine Will of your choice of God.

To guide you.

Amen.

Through Acheron.

To the blue Stargate.

So you can once more run. 

(C) Copyright John Duffy

Art by:

Adolf Hirémy-Hirschl in 1898. 

Revelations. N.o. 1.

 

A poem exploring whether every thought, action, and feeling becomes part of your story, whether seen or unseen.

Centered around the theme.

Can you change before it's too late?

Revelations. No.1.

(A regal voice whispers)

You do know what you do and feel in public or secret.

My child.

Writes all your life's many hidden manuscripts and follow's you like a Charles Dickens-Jacob Marley character.

Into and after the crypt.

So do more good.

Purge yourself.

Pull yourself away from the Great Tempter's black hole.

Don't just sit and judge.

Urge your soul or the goal could be:

You.

Stripped and whipped as you become just another of the Devils legion's of unloved conscripts.

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(C) Copyright John Duffy 

The Seer

 A poem exploring if you've suffered deeply, can your pain become wisdom—but only if you choose forgiveness over bitterness, letting go of self-torment, and to stop projecting pain onto yourself and others; for happiness, slow and earned, to eventually return.

(A lone voice whispers)

To you who have swum, filled with misplaced faith, in the deepest of obsidian rivers and streams.

Of the mind.

Brimming with crimson and purple screams of heartbroken dreams.

Of the unspoken kind.

Just know you might, in turn, know the true value of eventual happiness.

From what you've learned and earned.

For you, whose once soft hearts have felt hatred but decide instead to embrace forgiveness.

To extinguish sadness.

Will always someday dance hand in hand with old Mother Gladness.

But those who hang their cherished coattails on internalized judgmental emotional madness.

Will seldom find peace.

For to abandon oneself to wallow in self-torment and grief and project it onto others.

There can never be any soul-saving relief.

Just let it all go.

These are the words of I, Aluna the First.

The blind seer, whose bright, hungry eyes always thirst.

For those still on the lonely journey in a place I once visited called Earth.

(C)

Copyright John Duffy 

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Survival

 

A poem about losing innocence.

Being wounded by love, society, and broken ideals, Being saved (but not cured) by art. Living with awareness that sadness never fully leaves—it only changes shape.

It doesn’t ask, “Are you healed?”

It asks something more honestly: “How are you surviving—and what keeps you from disappearing?”

Survival 

(A lone voice whispers)

Do you blindly in the old silence of your mind? Subsist with violence?

Like a once playful spirit who's been shattered into a million pieces?

Are you wandering lost but just constantly looking for guidance?

Like when you first met poetry or its mesmerizing lyrics in music?

And in those throes of new beginnings, did it encourage you to strive to come alive?

To try to bloom, to truly exist.

Did you abuse it when someone or something cruel made you say goodbye to all those once holy days?

When you were possibly in love or tainted by all those sad portraits sketched so beautifully, by what unkind, strange people say?  

Which some in society like to see painted in so many devious ways.

Ideals and principles uttered by people you deliciously cherished.

Loved or once worshipped.

As you wandered throughout that old life sheltered in unconditional bliss.

But when those spectacular times came to an abrupt end, you found the courage to depression resist.

When you looked for something truly meaningful.

To infuse your heart and soul into, like Saint John the Baptist.

Did you find a serene taste of tranquility in the written, spoken, or sung-out word?

To help heal and give you back a sense of being in total control? 

Did the years of being a true or part-time disciple to music.

Poetry or any form of catharsis. 

Help you find the freedom that continuously encouraged you to read, listen, or practice? To discover a more profound understanding of self-prosperity. 

That for you was invariably your implicit goal and a means to pay some of your soul's taxes.

But do you now live on a knife-edge with the Sword of Damocles? Hanging over you?

As you relate to new and old tales overflowing with happiness or pronunciations.

Centered and surrounding like an invading army.

A lonely word called Sadness?

(C)

Copyright John Duffy

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