Poems Inspired by a Podcast on Philosophy

I started listening to the podcast Philosophize This!, which breaks down philosophical ideas for us plebians. I’ve been skipping around from philosopher to philosopher and some of their ideas have inspired me more poetically than existentially.

I. Learning to tell time according to St. Augustine

What is time in reality,

and how is it measured?

Everything that happens,

leaves an impression.

I am covered with the soft hollows of everything and everyone that has happened to me.

I watch them fade from my skin the way you watch a bruise heal,

measuring how long I will keep these memories of hurt with me.

This is how I measure time, therefore, this is time:

how we hold on to things and how quickly we forget

 

II. Philosophizing impending heartbreak

There’s a philosopher called Heraclitus

who believed that everything is one, just in a constant state of flux.

Nothing holds on to what it is for very long because its permanence is impermanence.

We are traveling while having never left and one geography gives the other meaning.

So being in love and being out of love is the same and when you are gone the time we spent will seem that much more beautiful.

You will have left and are leaving and will always be here, with me.

In forgetting you I will always remember.

It will seem like we spent our lives in the very same place, spinning in our own orbit,

when really, we are thousands of miles of away,

the distance growing greater with every breath we take.

Everything is atoms and empty space.

Together we are matter, we matter.

Nothing can come into existence

because before it existed, it did not.

So maybe we were always here, in the darkness of the universe.

The composition of atoms themselves are static, it’s their configuration that changes.

Who we are will never change,

just how we fit together.

The only true statement we can make is “it is.”

The only true statement I can make is “we are.”

 

III. For Certain

We can’t know anything for certain besides the fact that we exist

and if I exist, and you exist, then we must also.

And in this truth is everything I would ever need for certain,

the rest can be a question because this is my only answer.