Before And After Poem by Colleen Courtney

I have one: humane - animalistic.... at least that's how I became when I made the choice to let the disease win! ...

The usual understanding of before and after is that of the transformation process from the plain to the beautiful, Your words are the reverse view and yet a second version would be more powerful! Before and After Ugliness - Beauty! Uncaring - Sweet! Hardened - Soft! Unreliable - Trustworthy! Deceitful - Honest! Deceptive - Loyal! Unstrung - Together! Untoward - Comfortable! Crazy - SANE! Colleen Courtney

Thanks for the note. You have described the situation 'before and after' very well indeed, in a few words. Well done!

Duality is what this frequency is all about! Get in its wild river or stand on the banks, eating grapes, throwing rocks, toes in the sand, sun on your fine face.. watching, enjoying. It is a choice, not always easy to see, but magic it becomes, when you crawl out of the water and onto the bank. I guess If I were motivated I could turn that into poetry...

Have you researched deconstruction at all? Derrida wrote entire books about linguistic duality and hierarchy. I have a similar poem called poem fields, which is analogous to the paintings of Mark Rothko's: color fields. Not only does it cover hierarchy and duality, but also subtilization and loose association. That's a fancy way of saying a spectrum of the general idea. I think you will enjoy my poem, as I enjoyed yours!

Short but so reflective of the things that make life such a bright and dark journey.

Contrasted things of life that come before and after.........well depicted in few words.......well done

Lovely Explanations lovely meanings.

And the gap between BEFORE and AFTER is so wide, it shows how damaging drug use is. It's amazing how certain bad habits which promise an artificial paradise, and initially deliver it, lead to the hellish dead-line expressed in the right hand column. I met a writer named Kenneth Boulding at a Science Conference. He gave a speech in which he announced a simple hope: WHEN HUMANITY WISES UP, LET'S HOPE IT DOESN'T DUMB DOWN AGAIN! But generation after generation, we are making the same mistakes. It's time that people start heeding us poets, right?

Somehow I think the mirror is in this, or for this. I like the force you use to write it.