Portals into the Past: My Old Poetry

I was going through some of my old poetry I wrote, and don’t even ask why, because it’s beyond me. But as I was going through it, I was fully expecting to have just a series of cringes and maybe even a bit of disgust of myself; my old high school self.

But that’s not what happened. What actually happened was something else.

Here’s one of the poems I’d like to share:

Have you ever seen someone so beautiful?
So perfect in every way?
Have you seen the perfect smile?
The perfect dimples on a face?
I’ve seen that person.
I see her everyday.
She sees me too.
But she doesn’t see me that way.
It doesn’t matter if she does.
Because when i see her
I’m happy just because.

I hesitate to admit it, but I was almost in tears, and I don’t know exactly why. Well maybe I do, but I don’t want to share that part of me, just yet.

I’m not sure if it was because of the pain it invoked while reading those poems, because, like Huxley seems to convey in his writing, as well as Shakespeare, Dostoevsky, and countless others, pain, it’s one of the single most powerful sources of inspiration. 

But why is that? Why do we resonate so well with, not only our own pain, but the pain of others? How is that we can feel the pain of other as if was our own?

I think it’s because pain is a universal trait. It’s a common burden we all carry. It’s like, although we all have individual experiences that cause us pain, in a way, it’s all the same.

When we see the hungry child in Africa, or the homeless man on the street, although we’ve never been too hungry or homeless ourselves, we know exactly what they’re going through. 

It’s like there’s a bond that connects us to all humans: universal pain.

So when I read my old poetry, it’s as if I was connecting with someone, and I’m not quite sure that someone was myself. Yes, it was me who wrote it, but in a way, it felt like someone else, a stranger.

And I mean that in the best of way, I actually do. It’s like I was able to learn from myself, even if that self was 6 years younger. It’s like, even though I’ve “grown up”, in a sense, I was still my teacher back then. It’s like I was preaching to my older self.

But that makes me wonder, how did I have such profound words way back then? Maybe back then, they weren’t even my own words, but of some higher spirit, though, at the time, I didn’t know what they meant?

Who knows, but I’m glad I’ve kept all my writing in a secure place, and I’m glad I have this blog. It’ll be there for me in 5 years, 10 years, even 20 years so that I can look back and see, maybe things weren’t so bad as I thought they were, or, maybe they were? If so, why did I keep going?

thanks for reading,

cory