My idealism in the mid-eighties led me to forks in the road. I couldn’t reconcile my deeper thoughts. I like to think I unintentionally chose paths that led to a gauntlet of challenging situations. These circumstances helped shape me into who I became later in life.
But I felt like I was on top of the world in 1986. I wrote this ‘untitled poem’ that became a personal soundtrack in my brain:
Evolution is a revolution of man and his destiny. To be what it was, no longer must be. It changes accordingly. Conclusions, Delusions, Transfusions Once we reach infinity We see that we are there continually… Dancing, prancing, trancing Look before you reach what you’ve begun On the run… We joke, smoke, toke Iniquity towards transfixity In a continual race To the end.
It was a soundtrack I struggled to turn off.
I subsequently entered into some dark spaces after 1986 and spent roughly 18 months sorting through the thoughts in my head. I ultimately re-emerged in 1989, somewhat broken, but with a different perspective that took me from the romantic and placed me in the realistic. And as much as I thought I loved Wordsworth and Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood, I now defaulted to Hermann Hesse and a more existential diet.
That soon passed, too.
I revisited the untitled poem in 2020 and updated it. I even gave it a title:
Getting the beginning (with it) redux (2020)
Evolution is a continual revolution of our destiny.
Being what it was won’t longer be,
It’s changing accordingly.
Conclusions, Delusions, Transfusions
Once we reach infinity
We see we were there continually…
Dancing, prancing, trancing
Even before you reach what’s begun
You’re on the run…
Joking, smoking, toking
Whittling in iniquity,
And continually racing
To the end.
I sit on lots of thoughts. I have rarely shared this poem (and now poems) with people. There’s a certain ambivalence connected to it because I relate it to feelings of shame. Reading it can feel like a painful portal to the past when I was naive and more narcissistic.
The poem was a tipping point that carried me away from that period of innocence where I experienced a sense of bliss and malaise that wasn’t sustainable into a world of mental roadblocks and emotions that I had to sort through.
But there is also hope in those words. And as I age, I can find more appreciation for them. It takes time to understand where you’ve been and where you are going, as cliche as that sounds.
I still want to hold on to Wordsworth, though, and better recognize my place on the continuum from recollections of early childhood.
Because in the end “the child is father of the man.”