3 poems by Adora Williams

On THE Pills

To begin my incongruence/momentaneous revolt with,
I invoke the third stanza of 51a Part of Song of Myself:
‘Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)’

Blue Pill, Red Pill… Have you ever thought of why Morpheus tricked Neo into taking
The Red Pill without explaining it first?
He even said something about the Red Pill leading to Wonderland
Note that Alice never chose Wonderland
As her real home.

Because your real home is where your loved ones are; bad as it may be,
Your real home is where — and who — your memory recall when you think that word: home.

This is a reality sustained by lies.

Every pillar of it is standing in an amendment of a Constitution of Lies;
It’s Culture, we call.
We chose it over nature at the beginning.
Millennia later, it’s a little late for this debate.

It’s Culture. It’s our home. We’ll fight for it untill the end. If there ever were a Paradise, we would choose Culture over it.
Not because we’re being tricked by our senses. But because we are children of it.
It built us a civilization. It allowed us the perception and judgement of beauty and the ugly.
And if it’s based off lies,
Let us celebrate, then, the decay of lying
As the ancient craft it is,
And life will imitate art.

Now, next time any awaken — unless they’re enlightened poets, of course — offer you two pills to choose, red or blue,
Choose the blue.

And in case you wake up from the dream in a parallel universe with it in your hand,
Find a sulky-faced man and give it to him, knee down, pray, light a cigarette,
And call it a day.

Standing in front of a lake full of possibilities

Seven of Cups with all its magnificence
Of being the last archetype reflected in the human mind
Thus, reflected in existence

Standing in front of a lake full of possibilities

But you can’t be too close or you won’t get the panorama
You must take a step back
To evaluate the line
To ponder the worthiness of standing on it
If the end will justify the means
Or if it’s just the darkness in your mind
Distracting you from the potential
Of the non-being at

Your mind
Eighty-six billion senders
A hundred trillion connections
Just to counterfeit the marriage of good and evil
That will result in echoed separation

Sometimes you just have to step back from the matter
To evaluate if it’s worthy of dreaming your dream on it
Or it’s just another impressionist picture in an art gallery
That should be just looked at and appreciated
And its understanding for conjectures

Then you might conclude that your dream needs to fly
And never rest in the ground
At least for some time

Until you get so tired you need to rebound in the night
The perpetual night that will result in perpetual light
With no shadow
Because the shadow should have merged into you and your
Definition

Because you can’t produce shadow in the shadow

Or can you
In the alternative ending

X-ray on the hologram walking on
The highway
That divides the
Wasteland of unfinished
Stories in random
Spots
That always debouches in Love

It’s always about Love

Love that rises
Love that falls
Love that sings
Love for the crisis
Love that weeps
Love that blows
And my Love has blown

That’s why I’m here
Declaring my love for the wasteland of dreams

Going down on it
Laying claim to it
And maybe sending it away later on

Synonyms

Baudelaire was right, multitude and solitude are synonyms

What is the synonym of synonym, though? — I asked my friend who is like the mother I’ve never had
It’s paradoxical, it’s poetic — she said
She knows me for real, that made no sense and it appeals to me
As if it was oxygen

Let’s ponder

The synonym for synonym on a thesaurus I’ve just checked is equivalent
But is it equivalent though?

The synonym for white is light, but light isn’t even a thing
Another synonym is ashen, but ashen is midway to black
Another synonym is silver, but if we’re going to maximise the vision
May it be yellow to golden

The synonym for black is every black coloured picture:
Raven, obsidian, onyx, charcoal
But a thing says no-thing about a colour
This makes no sense

It’s paradoxical, synonyms are never that equivalent
It is just a display of how many things a thing can be
And nothing at all

And that applies to human.
We are, sometimes we are
Nought — not? — and sometimes we are all—
Aught? —
I am alone and I am so done of all the synonyms within me

The synonym of synonym is paradoxical.
Baudelaire was right, though.
Solitude and multitude are the exact same thing, synonymously speaking
Black, white, the in-between, yellow maximised and the nether
Dimension near the border of the galactic vortex

Foto de Chris Montgomery en Unsplash

ABOUT THE POET

Adora Williams is graduated in Journalism and Languages and has written poetry for 14 years. She lives in a historic region of Brazil. Her poetry anthology in Portuguese is being published in Brazil and Portugal in December 2022.