I hope I’m not breaking any copyright laws here but I wanted to share a poem from a book I downloaded today. The book, which is available at Lulu.com, is called “Once Upon an Image” and is by a couple called Marama & Maek. He’s the poet while she is the visual artist. As such the book is filled with, at least in my humble opinion, wonderful poetry and some quite interesting digital art.

Anyway, here is the poem:

Upside Down Eyes

I believe I’ve spent part of my life away
the time when my eyes were upside down
I have no clear memory
I can’t put the time together or in order
It feels like I was hovering
Yet not above, but looking up from under
I can’t remember ever being me
It’s as if I existed without existing
I seemed to see only what I saw
Then am I who I appear to be
or am I not me?
Could I ever have been without knowing.
Being me as from another dimension,
would I have been me as the me I was.
A time when my memory had no memory of me;
when my eyes were upside down.

Through the poet’s words, I can relate to something that perhaps isn’t the real point of the poem but nevertheless means something to me. This something is the lack of a sense of who “me” is and of what, if anything, has shaped my dwindling sense of identity.

I long to understand why I am who I am today. I long to understand the construct of “me”, of who “I” am. I fall short of this understanding though. I don’t feel like a whole, integrated me. I don’t understand what has shaped who I am or the who I should be. I wish I could pinpoint something in my past that makes sense of my identity or lack thereof today, but if there is indeed anything back there at all, it eludes me. I guess the scary thing is that there is nothing back there at all, that the confusion is all in vain.

Yikes! Am I thinking aloud or what?