WRITING - SOMETIMES I WONDER
This Month (March) I’ll be writing about writing, how I write, why I write. That’s it. so if you’re a writer, then check out the World of 0w1 social media feeds and let’s start a conversation.
A few years ago I wrote this soul searching poem. I was not in a good place!
This was in the days when I had completed the draft of “0w1:believe” but there was no prospect of seeing it published, let alone banned (deleted) by Amazon.
I think as writers we go through a rough, arid terrain of disquiet and dissatisfaction and at times it’s difficult to see a way forward or recover any sense of well-being.
My process has always to carry on, be resilient and persevere. Writing does help me, slowly, to find a way through; of establishing good practices that help me see.
Nowadays, I know who I am and that probably is the only thing that has changed; not the world ‘out there’, but the world inside of me.
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Sometimes I wonder
Sometimes I wonder why I’m alive.
Why I survived, was allowed to deprive death
of its quarry,
permitted to live in the face of three life
threatening incidents and accidents.
(those early days of disaster’s shadow)
Was I destined to live anyway?
If I escaped death for a purpose, what was, what is, it?
Is this it? Is this all? Saved for anonymity?
So much promise unfulfilled...so many
desires left without the joy of consummation.
Or did I die and I’m now a dead man
walking? Not so much the actual imago but the
second-hand facsimile!
Wouldn’t you think that I’d survive for something
special, some...thing a little more significant?
(I have friends but only one soul dude)
What have I missed? Am I a man out of time, or
a man running out, of time?
I had a family, but I was a burden to them.
They supported me, I did not support them. I was
denied, apparently, the possibility of doing so.
Am I a man walking out of step, tock-tick, with time, with
reality? Did the incidents and accidents leave me
in this state? The early years of educational struggles,
did this hinder my development?
Damn yes.
Am I now years behind where I should be?
Damn yes.
Did this temporal shift - set-back - cause the frustration which
marks my character?
Three Stigmata and more to come?
I was saved only to be the man I didn’t want to be.
I was saved only to survive and not thrive as the man I wanted to be.
I was saved only for subsistence’s sake.
This is not enough...it is not a form of love,
but of Divine abandonment...a life forsaken.
And yet,
there are times
when I feel so alive
when Absence is turned into Presence.
So, where’s the tension?
The strain lays in all this preciousness, but
also in the denial of life in the public
domain. Hidden away, a secret love, too
embarrassing to show in public. Sitting under
the table, but never at it.
The storehouse of the imagination is full
of seed, but no field to plant them in.
This body is the shape of the Spirit on Earth, but
it is never cherished; it only feels pain. This flesh
is but a receptor of anguish and pity. Is this something else
which shifted along with my temporal existence, that was
dis-placed, out of phase, because of those
incidents and accidents.
Is this why I have a body...just so I can
experience pain? Where is pleasure, where is joy, where is
the eternal moment?
And so...
oh to be...in the moment, a man of my time, in step, tick-tock.
That’s it...
Are you watching over my shoulder as I write this?
Do you know what’s in my heart?
Sometimes...I wonder...
Geoff Hall
