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The Ego Lingers Longer Than The Mind
The ego lingers longer than the mind,
It dares to whisper yearnings of its own:
To manifest a will more keen than kind,
A shady glow that will not be outshone.
We think we know what stirs our minds to act,
We ought instead to heed our soul’s instinct
To save us from an inconvenient fact
That self-conceit to self-defeat is linked.
We know deep down a simple salient truth
Our baser drives, powered by ego’s urge,
Will subjugate the innocence of youth
And veer from self-perfection to self-surge.
This wayward impulse lives in us so strong
We may no longer discern right from wrong.
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Things Screw Up
Beer too warm, coffee too cold,
Things screw up as life skews down.
Golden years are hardly gold,
Beer too warm, coffee too cold.
Try not doing what I’m told,
Watch my green leaves fade to brown.
Beer too warm, coffee too cold,
Things screw up as life skews down.
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Youth is Wasted on the Young
“Youth is wasted on the young,”
Shaw declared. I half believe it.
To us whose song is nearly sung,
Youth does seem wasted on the young.
But as we scale that final rung,
Best neither to deny nor grieve it.
“Youth is wasted on the young,”
Shaw declared. I half believe it.
.
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Rob Fried is an 81 year-old emerging poet, a retired professor of education. He has authored several books, including The Passionate Teacher (1995, Beacon Press) and The Game of School (2005, Wiley). He lives in Concord, New Hampshire.
Plenty of perceptive wordplay in all three of these poems, Rob. It makes both triolets very good of their kind, managing those required refrains while displaying wordly wisdom. “The Ego” tells psychological truth, treating human nature as composed of body, mind, and soul, but doing it in an unobtrusive way. Yes, dementia sufferers continue to display self-interested ego (associated with “baser drives”) when the mind is no longer capable of reasoning, or of heeding higher instincts of the soul. The final couplet, though, says “we MAY no longer discern,” giving a touch of hope that the self-surging ego doesn’t always prevail in the end. Enjoyed these!
The two triolets are perfect little confections of verse, as that form should be.
The sonnet, however, is too weighted down with abstraction and argumentation. This makes it somewhat prosaic and preachy.
Your last triolet is my favorite. Thanks for contributing these poems, Rob.
I enjoyed all three poems and their expositions though one opinion differs from mine.
I’ve never understood iced coffee, but I can well understand poems that ring with bright ideas. Warm beer is an English thing, and one gets used to it in time.