It has been nearly two years since I last wrote a poem. Two years at the end of September. That was a special poem as it was like a diary, recording my growing feelings soon after Carmen and I met and were on our first holiday together in Cornwall. I’ve always written poetry in fits and starts through my life. I have notebooks full of scribbles and musings and I even still have a plastic bag full of the torn remnants of all my pre-1993 poetry. I self-destructed one night after my lover at the time aggressively raged at me for writing a poem to my best friend on her birthday – one day I’ll get the sellotape out and put the pieces together!
This morning after I have written the poem below I began to think about why it is that I have not written for so long. Maybe it is because I have been waiting to find my authentic voice of my core self. My voice has broken and now it is time to sing again maybe. Be warned – my guitar-playing is getting easier now my fingers are stronger so watch out for me doing my version of the easiest song I know how to play, ‘Working Class Hero’ by John Lennon, coming to a YouTube channel near you before too long 😉
I hope you enjoy reading the poem. I keep hearing the stories of other guys as they struggle with T-induced insomnia and other major body shifts. This is how it felt like to me, this morning, in my 12th week of testosterone….
Feral Daydreams
A lone bee busies himself in the lavender
While the blackbirds sing in the morning,
Tunefully sparring from the safety of their trees.
The world is waking again today.
I see it with my night eyes waning
Aware that I will sleep to the rising buzz
That marks the birth of each fresh solar dawn
Like yesterday, today and tomorrow.
Will it always be as this from now?
Upside-down in a non-nocturnal world?
Back-to-front in a land of office hours,
At least in the country I live in.
But I have to sleep when my body tells me.
When the birds and bees start their shifts
Is how it is for now, as I am on bat-time
Until the new me is fully born it seems.
For now I will have one last tea and smoke
Reflecting on the here and now around me.
Before climbing upstairs and into the nest
Nuzzling my mate in slumbering daydreams.
It feels like puberty is feral, a special transition itself,
Where new order emerges from the chaos
Of the shiny and sometimes deadly sharp
Fragments of a former self.
Sleep. Sleep. Sleep.
© Sam Feeney
19 August 2010
Stubborn Dogs 