Jack Pelham

Ah! That intoxicating hope that
Second Things First might actually be
A viable policy—

That too-good-to-be-true notion that,
For many vain people,
Is also the too-good-to-pass-up thrill—

There are hundreds of posts and pages here, with all kinds of material. This home page shows the latest posts, and they tend to come in waves. So if you should see lots of poetry posts in a row, or lots of lengthy articles on this or that, please don’t assume that that’s all there is to the site! You can peruse the links above to get an idea of what all is here. And if you find the site interesting, I hope you’ll go read my “About” page here.

Enjoy!

Jack

Until a person
Has surrendered fully
To his own fallibility,
And no longer supposes that
“If I were wrong about this,
I would know it,”—

I don’t think
He’s ready yet
To consider
The things of this world
As they truly ought to be considered.

They say the light from the stars
Takes a very long time to reach us,
And I wonder at how
It seems to be the same
With the light of the ancient scriptures—
So distant from us in time
And culture
And speech
That we still haven’t quite
Got it yet.

Fraught with error
And delay
And distraction
As they may have been,
I have spent these years
Generally advancing
Upon the conclusion that
Our species is prone
To clumsiness of mind,
And is yet most
Wondrously capable of rising
Momentarily into brilliance
When it suits us.

And it strikes me
That this might just be
A good thing to know
About ourselves.

The cheater will seize upon an ambiguity
In your evidence for a thing,
And resolutely take the opposite view to yours,
As if the matter weren’t really
Ambiguous after all.

He makes a grand mistake
Who counts his belief in a thing
Among the reasons that
The thing should be believed.

When a man finally grows up,
He realizes that he is naked.
And then, it’s
Time to get dressed.

Without outside help,
Man wouldn’t even know
That he was naked.

Has that good idea
Worked its way through
Your soul yet?