Poetry

Epic and Autobiographical (A Versified Finale) An Autobiographical Narrative: 1990s 3

by Carl Halling
08/22/14
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A Perfectly Foolish Young Man I Wanted Part Two Book Five Epic and Autobiographical (A Versified Finale) An Autobiographical Narrative: 1990s 3

An Autobiographical Narrative: 1990s

Some months after appearing

In the Scottish Play at the Lost Theatre

In the one-time working class

West London suburb of Fulham,

I wrote the piece featured below,

Such a Short Space of Time.

But in the first instance

It was part of an unfinished short story,

Not a poem at all.

My parents were on vacation

During the period which inspired it,

Which is to say early in the summer of 1999.

Hence, I spent a lot of time at their house

Performing various tasks,

Such as watering my mother's flowers.

As well as this, I took sneaky advantage

Of their absence to transfer

Some of my old LPs onto cassette.

It was something my own music system

Was incapable of doing, unlike theirs.

And it was a profoundly unsettling experience,

To listen to songs that, perhaps in the cases

Of some of them, I'd not heard

For twenty years, or even twenty five, or more.

With a heartrending intensity,

Doing so had the effect

Of evoking a time

When I was filled to the brim

With sheer youthful joy of life

And undiluted hope for the future.

Yet as I did so, it seemed to me

That it was only very recently

That I'd heard them for the first time,

Despite the colossal changes

Brought about not just in my own life,

But the lives of all those of my generation.

Hence, I was confronted at once

With the devastating transience

Of human life,

And the cataclysmic effect

The passage of time exerts on all human life,

And it was a profoundly unsettling experience.

Such a Short Space of Time

I love not just those

I knew back then,

But those who were young

Back then,

But who've since

Come to grief, who,

Having soared so high,

Found the consequent descent

Too dreadful to bear.

With my past itself,

Which was only yesterday,

No, even less time,

A moment ago,

And when I play

Records from 1975, Soul records,

Glam records, Progressive records,

Twenty years melt away

Into nothingness.

What is a twenty-year period?

Little more than

A blink of an eye.

How could

Such a short space of time

Cause such devastation?

I love not just those

I knew back then,

But those who were young back then.