Into The Void, I Wrote

It was 1971, the Vietnam War was still raging. The world, split neatly into two parts, each pointing fingers and hurling accusations at each other. Fathers looked away from sons who did not want to fight. Mothers lit candles and said prayers as politicians lied and postured and posed for cameras, casting shadows of fear across the lives of the citizens who didn’t know much but trusted greatly — as they didn’t understand what else to do. It was in this little maelstrom that I wrote my first poem. My first purge that neither rhymed nor read very well but housed in its short form so much emotion that I could not stop the tears from falling onto my notebook as I wrote the lines. It was a time of doubt and depression. A time of unlimited questions and few answers and those often lost in the haze of drug use and self-medication. I needed to be heard; first by me and next by a world that took too many of us for granted. Who saw the younger generation as so much fodder. To be used to forward an agenda. To be lost to prove a point that the world was not a safe place. To be lied to because we lacked the value of the more financially set backers who supported the machine that ran an otherwise fine nation. The age of Flower Power was receding and the notion of free love had been adulterated to the point that it all seemed rather seedy. That we loved freely had been twisted into its counterpart, that we loved without purpose and therefore negated the whole thing. <a href="https://medium.com/on-reflection/into-the-void-i-wrote-e178d6e363f3">Visit Now</a>