Plato's Cave

Plato’s Cave

In your shadow world

You might take me as a prisoner

For I do not believe in the duality of

                        perceptual reality

Or the ‘thing’ of/in itself.

 

Protoplasmic molecular conjunctions

Ephemeral constitutives

Conceptual, sentient contortions.

 

You challenge my

Incomprehension of Form

                             of Idea.

 

But all you do is verify

You never loved.

--Constance Stadler has been writing, publishing, and editing poetry from the ‘prehistoric’ epoch of print journals to modern e-times. She was a former editor of South and West and is currently a contributing editor to the e-zine Eviscerator Heaven. She has published over 300 poems and three chapbooks in her ‘first manifestation’ as a poet, and has just released her first two chaps in 20 years, Tinted Steam (Shadow Archer Press) and Sublunary Curse (Erbacce). A new full length manuscript, Paper Cut is in final stages for publication. Her most recent work appears in such 'zines as ditch, ken*again, Pen Himalaya, Rain Over Bouville, Clockwise Cat, Hanging Moss, Calliope Nerve, Neonbeam, and Gloom Cupboard. She was recently “Featured Poet” for the Guild of Outsider Writers. Her website is www.conniestadler.blogspot.com. As a political anthropologist specializing in North Africa and a violinist, her influences are multiform. Work in formative years with the late poet Gwendolyn Brooks was seminal, but no less so than Sufi Dervish dancers, and the challenges of mastering Bruch's first concerto.