Imagination

My Poem ‘The Falcon’

Mark Hastings Poetry , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Above my head,
soaring in the perfect, beautiful, morning, blue sky,
I see a falcon flying, hovering, floating on air,
looking, seeing, listening, hearing, feeling,
silently like a shadow, a silhouette,
passing right through the intense golden
and white light of the sun’s glare and stare.

The sight of the falcon is hypnotic;
the gift of the falcon is fantastic;
the freedom of the falcon is breathtaking;
the feeling I get from the falcon is amazing.

Watching the falcon move over the fields,
and cast a shadow over the ground below,
the spirit of the falcon looks even more incredible to behold,
because it’s colour is so dark upon the white frosty fields
that are the colour of snow.

I have always been in awe of birds,
especially “birds of prey” –
Eagles, Crows, Hawks, and in particular
the great and amazing Peregrine Falcon;
I have always felt as if I were an animal
who had reincarnated at the end of my life, in another life,
and my spirit used to be once in the body of a bird,
and I used to have feathers and wings,
and senses and instincts that were heightened and always turned on.
I have always wanted to live the life of a bird,
and fly like the wind;
I have always wanted to live free and unbounded,
and be with whom my spirit is, and has been, eternally twinned.

I envy the falcon that I see;
I empathize and I feel the beat of its heart;
I can fully imagine the exhilaration,
and how important and powerful it experiences
and feels every sensation;
I wish I had literal and physical wings,
so that I may not have to wait to go where I want to go
at any time, and fly all the time;
and if I had the choice one day about who or what
I might like to be in another future life,
I will take a second, I think, and then say
what I am thinking now:
I want to come back to life, and have the life,
and live the life of a falcon.

My Poem ‘Missing Words’

Mark Hastings Poetry , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

We read in sentences, not words;
we sometimes see words that are not there,
but are meant to be there;
we sometimes hear in our mind the unheard;
we all make connections
and take leaps of logic and imagination
when trying to make sense of something
that makes us feel, think, jump with joy, and care.

We all give a part of ourselves
to what we create, read, love, and see;
we all see and sculpt shapes of the clouds in the sky
in our mind and vision that resemble things
from our hopes and dreams;
we all take trips of instinct and intuition
when thinking about what is and what could be;
we can all draw the shape of a heart and share it,
and receive it, and instantly know what it means.

Our brains and our minds are more powerful
and more capable of navigating a path than we believe,
even one that might appear treacherous and impassable;
our accumulated knowledge
is deeper and richer than buried treasure,
and we sometimes know more than we think;
our individual way of seeing hope in chaos
is something that is truly magical;
our gift of seeing things before we see them in front of us
is an unbelievably incredible source of fantastic vision
and inspiration that take us anywhere and show us anything
with a blink.

Missing words are like puzzle pieces that we fill-in silently;
missing words are like invisible bridges
that come to life naturally and give meaning and feeling,
and they capture something’s spirit, like poetry;
missing words are always found,
and they always make themselves heard –
like nature does at sunset, with the evening song of all birds;
and if and when the moment calls for it,
you and your amazing mind will instantly seek out
and reach for the right words and they will be what were once
the missing words.

My Poem ‘The Great Detective’

Mark Hastings Poetry , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

The great detective knows the streets of his city
like he knows the indelible lines on the palms of his hands;
the great detective sees the world and its people
as if they are an intricately-interwoven and infinite puzzle;
the great detective walks with knowledge and conviction,
with a mystery to be solved in his pocket,
and he knows of nothing that he has not already considered,
thought about, and played out in his mind in a hundred ways,
and because he sees and knows only
solutions and answers to every question,
the great detective walks with phenomenal confidence;
the great detective is not oblivious to breaking a sweat
and fighting for what he believes is right,
should the time and need arise –
however, he strives to find a way to win the day
without having to encounter, or get involved,
in any sort of tussle of trouble.

The great detective is always thinking,
and his imagination and his thought process
is boundless and second to none;
the great detective has a vast palace of memory
in which he keeps the things he holds the most precious;
the great detective has a mind as fast,
and a tongue as quick, as a bullet from a gun;
the great detective has seen wonders,
and has met people who exhibit traits of humanity
from all ends of the spectrum,
but he is still proud to call himself
a member of the human race –
however, he believes that when people do start listening
to what he has to say he will be the saviour of all of us.

The great detective believes above all else
that through logic and reasoning
even the improbable can have a reason for being
that can be simplified to a simple sentence;
the great detective is not afraid to act
and think simultaneously, and adapt on the fly;
the great detective thrives on the rush of a new experience;
the great detective knows he is good, perhaps great, at what he does –
so when asked if he is modest about his gifts he does not have to lie.

The great detective can conjure up a deduction in the blink of an eye;
the great detective has seen things that are so beyond words
and description, the only other way to classify them
would be to think of them as magic;
the great detective himself cannot not pigeon-holed,
nor his ego or self-belief subdued –
although some have failed when they have tried;
the great detective is like a force of nature,
and even to himself, when he looks in the mirror at his reflection,
or when he considers the most perfect of callings for himself,
he always returns to the most elementary conclusion
at the end of his deductions:
and that is that, beyond anything or anybody that he could be,
he is, and was always meant to be, who he is,
and who he will always be – the great detective.

My Poem ‘Echo’

Mark Hastings Poetry , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

I often wonder why people go to the same places:
why they shop at the same shops,
why they eat at the same restaurants,
why they drink the same drink at the same pubs;
I often wonder why music, fashion, brands,
bands, writers, movies, have the impact that they have,
and why they become the thing that someone people genuinely love;
I often wonder the same questions as an ‘ad man’ would
of a product he is figuring out how to sell and advertise,
and get people thinking and talking about something;
I often wonder the same thoughts as an artist
has to think when they want to start turning their passion
into a means of living.
There must be thousands, if not millions,
of people like me in the world,
but I don’t think that there are many people
who ask questions and come up with their own informed answers
in spontaneous verses of poetry –
most people don’t have the time to think about things
that are outside of their normal way of thinking,
their circle, and do not have the passion that I have
for imagination, connection, freedom of expression,
through a love of life and words;
I would guess that there are not that many people
who can see what I see.

I have always been fascinated by what draws people
and all forms of life to what they desire
and want above all else:
when a moth is drawn to a flame,
that doesn’t mean that they want to kill themselves;
when an astronaut leaves the Earth,
that doesn’t mean that they want to separate themselves
from the world and from the rest of humanity;
when someone does something
that may have consequences for them in the future,
when they start they are not thinking
that what they are doing will one day be bad for their health;
when someone looks for an answer in a book,
or in a story about a time gone by,
they are looking for a truth already been found by someone else,
they are looking for clarity.

The rings within a tree are an echo of its life
and of the times that they have lived through;
the DNA of someone is an genealogical timeline
of an entire family of infinite members
that can be traced back and mapped to the beginning of time;
the frequency of every piece of man-made technology
can be followed back from the present day,
to the invention of the light-bulb,
to the manufacturing of the first wheel,
to the amazing and phenomenally detailed drawings of Leonardo da Vinci;
the entire meaning of all that matters
can be glimpsed in the natural art of the universe,
and in the first thought that always follows
when someone asks a question of why?
Everyone, and everything that happens,
exists, and is a thing of momentous importance,
in the endless ripples and waves that is
the universe of the big bang of creation’s echo.

My Poem ‘Dreams’

Mark Hastings Poetry , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Dreams are where we live our second life,
and where we live out our thoughts and wishes;
dreams are the alternate reality
where anything you want to happen can happen
without consequence;
dreams are where we live out our fantasies,
and share hidden kisses;
dreams are where we can go anywhere we can imagine –
into a possible future that you hope will come true,
or the memory of a school trip that you had
to the south of France;
dreams can seem more real than reality,
and can feel like a more desirable place to live;
dreams can seem to last for days,
when you are deeply involved in the constantly changing
and evolving dream creation of another world;
dreams can seem like heaven,
depending on whom you are dreaming you are with;
dreams can seem strange, weird,
too good and fantastic to ever be true,
and wonderfully absurd-
however, dreams are as necessary to life
when we are asleep as oxygen is to us when we are awake;
dreams can be a cure, a therapy, what we need to stay alive,
but also a medicine that can be hard for us to take.

The dreams that we have when we are a child
are the best dreams that we will have in our lives-
especially the good ones;
the dreams that we have when we are an adult
are sometimes mostly filled with worry
and things that we constantly have
floating on the surface of our mind;
the dreams that we have when we are in another country,
or in a wonderful but unfamiliar place,
on holiday, are free of angst and expectation,
and are dreams of pure unbounded imagination;
the dreams that we have after meeting someone new
are as beautiful as what the world must be imagined like
to someone who has for their entire life been completely blind.

I have had hopeful dreams;
I have had beautiful dreams;
I have had dreams in which I have met people
I have wanted to meet since I was young.
I have had nightmares;
I have had bad dreams that have brought me face to face
with the source of all my fears.
I have had imaginary encounters that even to this day
I still remember having,
because they still continue to be more important to me
than to others they might seem.
In my mind, at night,
I have been able to rewrite the times when I was wrong;
I have dreamed of things that I do not clearly remember
in great detail the morning after,
but I have awoken in tears.
I have always been fascinated by the power of inspiration
and the infinite capacity of both the conscious mind,
and the unconscious mind, and I love remembering
and finding the answer to a riddle
played out before me in real life,
of something I once saw, felt, and did in my dreams.

My Poem ‘The Eternal Boy’

Mark Hastings Poetry , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

What I think is one of the most amazing things
about being a child, is that when you are a child
you have no filter;
I personally think that despite their lack of words
and vocabulary, a child is an incredible and terrific communicator.
A child is the perfect communicator,
because they never stop asking questions,
and they always have an answer or an expression for everything;
a child will say anything, cry, laugh, dance, and sing,
without any feeling of embarrassment
or thought of doing anything wrong;
a child acts and bounces around in every way
like a coiled spring;
a child feels their most joyous and free
when they are testing the limits of what they are told.

I sometimes feel like Peter Pan,
like the boy who never grew up;
I sometimes feel like I am fighting against those in life
whom do not understand me, and whom would choose
to silence me and subdue my creativity,
and keep me from flying among the clouds in my own world –
my own personal Captain Hook.
Imagination is the key,
and something that people as they grow older forget that they have;
imagination and freedom of expression
is what we are all born with.

Growing up doesn’t mean losing yourself;
growing older doesn’t mean changing your child-like disposition;
growing physically doesn’t mean forgetting the awe of magic
that you can have even as an adult;
growing emotionally doesn’t mean cutting short
your journey of wonder expedition.

There are things that not even what happens to us in life
can change or erase;
there are things that cannot be found unless you look;
there are things that are forever crystallized
on the expressions of everybody’s face;
there are things that you just can’t stop or stub;
there is a spark of life and pure happiness
that stays with you from when we are a child,
and a reminder to us all that we should
never completely grow up.

My Poem ‘The Light Fantastic’

Mark Hastings Poetry , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

The world is dark at night;
when there are clouds above
everything can seem grey;
within peoples’ heart’s
there is always light;
stars shining constantly
reveal more to life, more to us,
more than the sun of a spring day.

Every day I look far,
and hope appears;
every day I see patterns of stars,
and my imagination jumps light-years;
every day I look for a fire to sit in front of
and gaze longingly at,
and I witness the birth of a new spark;
every day I realize I have something
that some might say: ‘I would give anything for that’,
and for good, or ill, I get a sense
as to how I have lived, how I live, how I make my mark,
how I have given my heart right from the start.

Bridges are built every day;
most of us have the gift of choice;
technology has paved a new way;
everybody is now discovering that they have always had a voice;
people are learning more;
everybody is becoming savvy in multiple ways of interactivity;
people are talking to each other like never before;
we all feel, sometimes, as if we have backstage passes,
when we can see and reach out to people we idolize –
like a well-known artist or celebrity.

We can all literally find ourselves
with stars in our eyes anytime we want;
we can all take a trip to anywhere;
we can all feel triumphant
when we see the fruits of our commitment,
we can all go to the places where angels and demons
no longer fear to tread;
we can all make dreams real and tangible;
we can all be romantic, pragmatic,
dynamic, classic, terrific, or act wonderfully melodramatic;
we can all be radical, casual, natural, fanciful;
we can all be the one who searches for, lives for,
has, and is, what makes the light of life fantastic.