Former Poetry Junkies
Met some old poetry junkies last week.
There we sat, now grey faceless civil servants, backs bowed by the weight of bureaucracy, eyes dulled by cubicle air, hearts sapped of inspiration by soulless report-writing, there we sat politely, unseeingly and wordlessly, staring at our cold thin tea, trying to remember…
another life, another time, another place, the thick hot nights we wrote and dreamt together feverishly talking frantically tossing ideas free associating exploring psychedelic epiphanies waking from sleep to jam slam with words cruising the infinite dimensions of space meshing consciousness distilling rainbow realities drinking in Camus Wittgenstein clothed by Wagnerian musk phenomenological Sartre deconstructing Hegel Heidegger annihilating Nietzsche dancing through Borgesian labyrinths trashing Beckett Stoppard
Then we grew up. Then we sold our dreams for a university certificate. Then we spent the next few years of our life pushing paper.
We had been slowly drifting away for some time. When they tried to set up a Creative Arts Programme Alumni, we knew the end was near. When the maddest of us asked for a civil service job, we knew our time had passed. Reality had overwhelmed us. Work for sustenance was necessary.
Some have tried to salvage the situation with:
Was life more exciting then? Was life more colourful? Yes it was far more exciting and colourful. But the fast and furious living, the excitement and colour were born out of an ignorance of reality, a fear of the unknown and an uncertainty of the future. Now for me, the fearful confusion of the past shakily propped up by false conflicting philosophies has been replaced by a solid and firm foundation of true reality in Christ. I wanted to share that with my friends. But how could I even begin to tell them, how could I even start a conversation like that in the cold uncomfortable silence?
Then, one of them turned to me and said,"So tell me: why do you study the Bible?"
There we sat, now grey faceless civil servants, backs bowed by the weight of bureaucracy, eyes dulled by cubicle air, hearts sapped of inspiration by soulless report-writing, there we sat politely, unseeingly and wordlessly, staring at our cold thin tea, trying to remember…
another life, another time, another place, the thick hot nights we wrote and dreamt together feverishly talking frantically tossing ideas free associating exploring psychedelic epiphanies waking from sleep to jam slam with words cruising the infinite dimensions of space meshing consciousness distilling rainbow realities drinking in Camus Wittgenstein clothed by Wagnerian musk phenomenological Sartre deconstructing Hegel Heidegger annihilating Nietzsche dancing through Borgesian labyrinths trashing Beckett Stoppard
Then we grew up. Then we sold our dreams for a university certificate. Then we spent the next few years of our life pushing paper.
We had been slowly drifting away for some time. When they tried to set up a Creative Arts Programme Alumni, we knew the end was near. When the maddest of us asked for a civil service job, we knew our time had passed. Reality had overwhelmed us. Work for sustenance was necessary.
Some have tried to salvage the situation with:
- Quarterly Literary Review Singapore
- the2ndrule
- Softblow Poetry Journal
- Capsule
- Poetry Billboard
- Wordfeast
- Wordforward
- Singapore Writers' Fest
Was life more exciting then? Was life more colourful? Yes it was far more exciting and colourful. But the fast and furious living, the excitement and colour were born out of an ignorance of reality, a fear of the unknown and an uncertainty of the future. Now for me, the fearful confusion of the past shakily propped up by false conflicting philosophies has been replaced by a solid and firm foundation of true reality in Christ. I wanted to share that with my friends. But how could I even begin to tell them, how could I even start a conversation like that in the cold uncomfortable silence?
Then, one of them turned to me and said,"So tell me: why do you study the Bible?"
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