Dispatches from the Trenches of Despair
Introduction
‘Dispatches from the Trenches of Despair’ was finally completed around late April 2021, marking the end of a period of severe depression extending from around Tuesday the 13th to the end of the month, and yet almost completely dispelled by the beginning of May, and there seems every reason to believe that I shall remain relatively content for an indefinite period of time. It is not a unique work, having been significantly composed from earlier poetic pieces in various stages of completion, with only the final four lines being wholly new, and they are easily are the most optimistic. And yet, no work of art should in my view be accepted as necessarily reflective of current reality, and indeed as of the time of writing this introduction, exactly three weeks on from my initial descent into the so-called trenches of despair, the verses I composed from within them are already part of my recent history.
Dispatches from the Trenches of Despair
I howled out in pain,
Some time ago now,
Like some poor feral beast
Cruelly caught in a trap,
And several times since,
I howled out in pain
At the thought of the waste
Of the life that might once have been mine,
Of the appalling mess
I made of my most precious days,
And all the hurt I inflicted
On souls who once believed in me,
For all throughout the years,
I threw both fortune and love away,
Not once but repeatedly,
Time and time again,
I destroyed the very best
That life can gift a person with,
And with such an obscene facility,
I stand on the precipice
Of the final pathetic phase
Of a catastrophic existence,
Quite saturated with heartache,
And half insane with regret,
Yet, I never even sought the compensatory gifts
Of peace and domesticity,
The little ones that might have been,
They were all spirited away from me
By a monster in thrall
To some perverse pathology,
And yes, that monster was me,
I am the legacy of his aberrancy,
Still I strive on a diurnal basis
To make the best of the little that remains to me,
And if I can serve as a kind of warning,
I might yet know a measure of peace…
