This poem was written during a time when I was exhausted, but not depressed – long before my initial encounter with Depression. I was disenchanted with many things and felt like I was being torn in a lot of different directions by the demands in the household I was living in, my work, my Church and my own emotions. I was in phase of experimenting with free verse as well as some old English language. The reference to beauty and truth draws back to Ode on a Grecian Urn by Keats which I studied for my HSC.
The poem reflects the way I have often felt in more recent times when progressing toward becoming unwell.
Reality bites?
Bites? Nay – it gnaws.
It grinds me away with its powerful jaws.
There is breaking and tearing –
Yet taste, yet flavour.
Mastication, taste, digestion, excretion –
Where is reality?
Where is truth?
Is beauty all truth? Or truth beauty?
Which portion –
Which fragment
of that which is truth…
is reality?
livingwithablackdog 