Poems of Separation Part 1 - Unequipped

You placed the burden on my shoulder

I wish that I was so much older

I have no tools to work with this

I have no power to dismiss

I had a shield composed of hay

It shattered when you went away

I wore my clothes and yet stood bare

Ignorant and unaware

A soldier with no ammunition

A canvasser who can’t petition

A car that cannot turn a wheel

A sense of touch I cannot feel

A writer struggling with a script

For this task I’m unequipped

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A little background

About a year and a half ago I went through a really nasty breakup that took me quite a long time to recover from. When it first happened I felt that I had no outlets for all of the thoughts in my head surrounding the circumstances.

I started listening to Bob Dylan and was amazed by the strong visual poetry within each of his songs, there was nothing particularly flashy but every song told a story and I liked that a lot. I thought I would try my hand at writing a variety of short poems as a way to vent about the unfairness of the situation (even though I wasn't sure if anyone would ever read them except for myself).

Flash forward to today and I'm doing great compared to that period in my life. When I look back at the poems I wrote at that time, I can feel the anger, dissatisfaction and sorrow within them. I realize that these poems really helped a great deal to lift me out of my mindset at the time and to vent about some of life's darker themes: separation, betrayal, abandonment, etc.

There are about 8 total and I'll be posting the same bison picture for each one so that you know the post is me and that it's within the same series of poems. Feel free to ask me any questions and stay tuned for more!

I took the Bison picture myself in Yellowstone National Park in 2015.

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