Five years ago, I wrote a ‘poem’. Actual poets might deride me. So I ask any actual professionals who might be reading this to forgive me. As far as I can tell, there is nothing compelling about it from a literary perspective. It is not splendidly arranged. It has no rhyme scheme. But it is my proudest literary work yet. And yet, perhaps unsurprisingly, no one seems to love it like I do. This is okay. It seems this is the case with many artists and their fans: ironically, their sensibilities are usually orthogonal.
This work is inspired by an instrumental piece of the same name by Argentine composer Astor Piazzolla. I first heard it when it was rendered on the acoustic guitar by Nadia Kossinskaja on YouTube. It was so beautiful, and deep and so haunting. I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t remain still. It evoked such a deep sadness and pain; pain I hadn’t felt before. But this sort of pain didn’t ache too badly. It just felt like a dull, throbbing feeling of perpetual unrest.
It also highlights a very important time in my life: a time when I was in a deep struggle with myself. I hope you will enjoy it. I hope you will derive meaning from it, and if not, share in my perpetual tango with my reality, at least. True to the meaning of the title, many times, the piece makes me painfully aware of forgetting: forgetting things and people, forgetting and losing yourself, and being forgotten.
Inspired by OBLIVION
Is it all worth it?
I want lose myself
I want to get drunk on my lust and rage
I want to feel the soul of the Most High
I want to sink like a stone beneath the lowest of the low in me
I want to throw myself into oblivion
It all feels meaningless
It all seems not to matter
Whether I live or die, it makes not a difference
To the big beautiful universe, I am less than a blip
Why it matters to me that I am a speck of dust
Or that I’m the blinding sun is tomorrow’s tale
My soul is torn and broken
Its cloth ripped, its brittle bones collapsing beneath
The weight of this world’s burden that it needlessly bears
I want to plunge myself into the recesses of my troubled spirit
To stand in the darkness that is me
That we may be singular
Star-bright God of gods
He who wraps himself in energy
He who is no he at all
The world is thy playground and
We are your animated dolls
I extol you tonight
If you will accept he who is not worthy
I will lift you who is already Most High
How about I lower you into
The depth of the underworld which you formed
Tell me Light of lights, Life of all that lives
Are you the most low, the Most Depraved as well?
Will you lend me your hand of power?
The right arm that subdues and exults that
I might fulfil my selfish desires
Will you make me a mini-God pray tell
That I might be you in here, or am I already?
It doesn’t feel like that at all
The mother cries because death claims his property
That is her child who descends from her womb
The man wails for lack of bread
Despair claims the joy of hard work and
You are left to wonder and gaze into the deep black darkness
Is it all worth it?
WRITTEN by yours truly