I don't know what happened...
I don't know how whatever happened happened...
I don't know when whatever happened happened, exactly;
however what I do know is that where I am now
feels more than a little familiar -
which is probably why I do not feel
as discombobulated as I might have done
if I were somebody else, or anybody else.
I have somehow, over time,
become accustomed to change,
to having to adapt to things on the fly,
and to thinking on my feet...
I have somehow trained myself
to just go with the flow
and not be shocked by anything that I hear,
nor by anything that I see...
I have somehow got used to
being someone who has no fear
of where I might find myself,
because I believe -
as I have always believed -
that wherever the path of life takes you
you find yourself where you need to be
and where you are meant to be for a reason...
I have somehow, multiple times, found myself
at a place, at a time, with certain people
who I thought I would always be with,
and then -
as if I have suddenly been whipped away
by the winds of a cyclone -
I find myself, once again,
far away from where I originally began
and walking the road before me alone.
What can any of us do
when the world around us feels as if
it has become inverted and as if
up is down and down is up?
What can any of us do
when we find ourselves
unable to return to a previous stage of life
because we have long-since moved on from it?
What can any of us do
when we know we have lost someone who we loved,
but who we were not meant to stay alongside -
because something was always going to make us realise
that what we shared would not always be enough?
What can any of us do
when what we thought we knew
about the way life is supposed to be
is questioned and tested,
and ultimately, one day, repeatedly,
we all find ourselves somewhere new,
with someone new, after making ourselves believe
that we would never again return
to where we were and we would never again
do what we did before -
but no one and no thing in this life
can ever truly stay adrift.
adaptation
My Poem “The Tough Stuff”
When people are surrounded
by artificial light, by heat, and by order
it can be hard to imagine what it was like
for the first generation of human explorers,
who originally began as one diverse group,
who then went their separate ways
to discover and to understand more
about what and who makes the world
the way that it is, as well as populate
the vastly different regions that
our planet is known for the have to be
adapted to living in in many different ways.
The first people didn’t have clothes…
the first people didn’t have maps…
the first people didn’t even have
wooden built houses to call homes…
the first people didn’t even have maths –
but what the first people had,
and what sustained them,
were dreams, inspiration, ideas,
and from the moment that they harnessed
to ability to willingly create fire
they gave themselves the gift to be able
to see and to travel during the night,
to cook their own meals, and to be entranced
by the dancing flames of glowing light.
The first men and women who
embarked upon their journey of fate
to go to places they knew not where
saw things that they could only
conceptualise by capturing their depictions
of them in cave paintings and in legends
that have endured for thousands of years.
The first of us were the first to feel the spark of love…
they were the first of us to feel the passion of life…
they were the first of us to look up at the sky
and wonder about our place in the cosmos,
surrounded by an infinite number of stars,
and question why any of us are here…
they were the first of us to be brave enough
to bring people together to create
entire civilizations who thrived for a time
and who had to go through
more than anybody alive today could ever imagine.
We who are alive today are
who we are, with what we have,
because our ancestors were more
than even they knew that they were at the time –
but one thing that our ancestors knew well
was that in life what everybody
and what everything sometimes needs
more than anything is each other,
and also the knowledge that by
working together anybody can
get through anything, even the tough stuff.
My Poem “Grounded”
One of the things that living
through times of uncertainty
teaches someone is to appreciate
all the things about a person’s life
that are the most essential…
one of the things that people
realize that they often take for granted,
especially when living through times of loss,
is the gift of knowing that
the friends and family members
are still managing to adapt
and to survive the best that they can.
One of the things that everybody
understands more acutely than they would
under normal circumstances
is why it is so important to tell people
how you feel about them, if you can,
when you can, how you can –
because sometimes things in life
do not always go to plan.
One of the things that people
have to deal with,
especially while learning how to deal with
the after-effects of a cataclysmic event,
is an unbelievable amount of stress
as well the sometimes difficult
endeavour of feeling under the weather,
trying to figure out how to live
when some connections
and when some avenues of stability
and serenity have been temporarily severed.
One of the things that the people
have to learn when they are travelling
down an unknown path
is the ability to course-correct,
to change how they think,
to change what they do,
and to remember what has always
kept them on the straight and narrow,
what their life revolves around,
and what it is in their life
that has always kept them grounded.
Mark The Poet 