For the first 57 years and 8 months of my life I didn’t give much thought to poetry. In terms of writing poems, I recall just two instances, both from my childhood. The first was a poem written as part of a Primary School project associated with a week-long residential trip to Tenby in Pembrokeshire with my wonderful teacher Mrs Hammond. All I can remember of the poem is its theme – an account of how us boys spent time charging around the hollows of the sand dunes pretending to be soldiers, machine guns rattling, all surprise attacks and spectacular deaths – and the first line: ‘In the sand dunes we played war’. The second was a poem written for a piece of history homework early in my time at Secondary School. We had been asked to write a short factual piece about some aspect of Norse mythology and, after checking with my teacher that I could present my piece in an unconventional form (thank you Mr MacLean), I produced an illustrated poem that began with the line: ‘Come demons and devils and all bad things, come help I, Loki, destroy everything’. Sadly, I don’t have copies of those poems anymore, just those two opening lines held as fragments of memory in my head. [As I write this, ~45 years later, it is interesting to note that both of these poems have a playful surface hiding an undercurrent of death and destruction but, of course, as a scientist I know that a sample size of two is insufficient for this to be considered a theme rather than a coincidence!]

I did not read poems, or anything much else really, apart from football and computing magazines and music, for most of my teenage years. English Literature was not a school subject that held me in its thrall – I was too busy imagining myself playing cricket for England at Lords, kicking a ball around the house and garden, teaching myself how to write computer code, practising the ‘cello and playing in various orchestras and other musical ensembles. In that phase of my life reading was a pursuit that the more I was encouraged (or even instructed) to do it by my parents the less inclined I was towards actually doing it and, fairly obviously I think, if exciting stories and thrilling adventures of dragons or spaceships in imagined worlds were not able to hold my interest then there was certainly no way that anything remotely resembling a poem was going to catch my attention.

In my late teenage years and onwards into my early 20s, my musical activity broadened and through much of my time at university I would not be found that far away from my guitar – playing and ‘singing’ some of the songs that my previously-only-Classical musical taste had expanded to consume voraciously. As they are for many young people, those first few years away from home were something of a turbulent melting pot of emotions for me and as someone who found it difficult to summon the confidence to simply tell another person what I was feeling I became a song-writer (perhaps that is too bold a claim), trying to say things through my musical verses that would otherwise have remained trapped inside me by my emotional muteness. Exactly what any of the individuals who were made to listen to my songs and especially those to whom I played and sang ‘their’ songs felt about this, and whether they ever actually understood what I was trying to express, largely remains a mystery to this day. Those songs were almost always enthused with a sense of melancholy (a word that I have always regarded as one of my favourites), in part because that was the over-riding emotional state that I seemed to experience at the time but undoubtedly also fueled by the inescapable fact that my singing voice has a natural tendency for flatness and descending lines (and, seemingly, a natural fondness for the chords E minor, A minor and B minor). Reflecting on this song-writing activity now it is obvious that creating a song was, in part, a process of writing a poem – tapping into some small phrase, a particular chord progression or a sudden explosion of emotion – but I don’t think I ever saw writing the lyrics for a song as writing a poem at the time.

I wrote my last song in 1991 at the age of 26. It starts with the phrase: ‘There’s something I want to tell you, it’s not easy for me to do’ which, on reflection, rather says it all. By this point in my life I was reading regularly and over the next three decades reading became an integral part of my life. Since 2002 I have kept a list of all the books I have read (keeping such a list is something I would thoroughly recommend to anyone who enjoys reading). The entries in the list are a real mixture that has shifted and broadened over time – fiction, non-fiction, crime novels, historical novels, science fiction, adventures, philosophy, science, history, psychology, self-improvement, productivity. Most genres are represented somewhere in amongst the hundreds of titles in the list but I am pretty certain that there is not a single scrap of poetry.

So yes, putting aside a couple of childhood poems and a collection of perhaps 20-30 mostly angst-ridden songs, it is safe to say that poetry was not something that has ever really been on my radar.

I suspect that most people think of me as a reasonably positive person who is organised (very organised, far too organised, sickeningly organised in fact), gets lots of things done and is generally at ease with themselves. In some ways this is a fair assessment although what would not be apparent, because I have become very adept at hiding such things, is the huge expenditure of effort and energy that all of that organisation costs. But there are a few people (perhaps only one other) who have been close enough to me over the years to have shared the experience of my inexplicable plunges into darkness, my sudden rages, my constant striving to attain a sense of self-worth sufficient to allow some kind of settling, my struggles to overcome a bone-deep sense of lethargy, my lack of motivation. I could go on. I have carried all of this with me throughout my life, always feeling deeply frustrated, angry even, with myself, struggling to function as I feel I should and never really feeling that I fit in or belong in the way that I tell myself that I should. At various times this struggle has bubbled to the surface, manifesting itself as what might conventionally be described as ‘burnout’ – first in 1991 in the final year of my PhD studies and then on at least three occasions in my professional life in 2000, 2009 and 2013. Each of these later episodes resulted in my stepping away from significant positions of responsibility that I held at work (aka ‘failing’) to lessen the load and open up space in which I could try to put myself back together.

In 2013 things began to shift a little. I took up running and although this became a bit of an obsession for a while (something I have quite often observed in others as they begin their running journey), I certainly recognise that it was a powerful and positive force of change in my life. In fact, it is no exaggeration to say that running was the catalyst for the journey of self-discovery that I have been on over the last ten years or so.

All of which brings me to the last couple of years, a period during which my life has changed quite a bit – on the inside at least. I won’t go into details here (after all, this is supposed to be a short introduction to a bunch of poems and not a full-blown autobiography; perhaps some of those details might emerge in another book one day…), suffice to say that in summer 2022 I was diagnosed with what is commonly referred to as Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) and all of the elements of my life, my personality and my history that I had previously struggled to make sense of began to snap neatly into place. Learning that you have a condition like ADHD at the age of (then) 56 is quite a revelation and also quite a comfort. But it is also a challenge, a double challenge in fact, because as well as the ongoing battle with the various traits and everyday issues that ADHD brings there is the added difficulty associated with the process of coming to terms with the integrated impact of living unknowingly with ADHD for an entire lifetime. It may seem like an odd thing for a 57-year old to write, but the last year or so has been a time of finding out about myself, of discovering the real me and of letting go of the unhelpful parts of the version me that has spent decades doing what it thought it ought to do to try to fit itself into the world.

It is often suggested that ‘knowledge is power’ and it was certainly true that knowledge of my ADHD-ness gave me some power over its more challenging presentations. But one of the main things that had led me towards seeking a diagnosis in the first place was the realisation that over a period of almost a decade I had naturally adopted many of the strategies and practices that are recommended for those struggling to operate well in a world that assumes that everyone can (and should) be able to play to the same set of rules. I figured that if I was already doing all of the things that the books, websites and podcasts suggested for anyone engaged in a battle with ADHD and, moreover, finding that it was necessary for me to do those things to function reasonably well, then I probably was one of the people fighting such a battle. This meant that although the knowledge that came with my diagnosis was useful, any enhanced power that it gave me was somewhat limited because it turned out that I already had much of it already. In fact, it wasn’t really the knowledge that I ‘had ADHD’ that made the key difference, rather it was the medication, medication that, with some reluctance and after much umm-ing and arr-ing, I decided to give a try a little over eight months ago. It turned out that, for me, the act of swallowing one small pill at the start of each day was akin to flicking the ‘on’ switch, waking me from the slumbering state that I had so often felt but not been able to shift and allowing me to dig inside myself to see what was really there.

I cannot say that taking medication for ADHD has been without issues. In the last few months I have noticed myself being forgetful in a way that previously I was not. I am now quite frequently what I call ‘time-blind’- completely losing myself in some task like a challenging project at work or a piece of writing (like this!) only to emerge hours later realising that I have not eaten all day or have done none of the multitude of small tasks that I had told myself I would do that day. I think I have become a little less patient and a little more hyperactive. In fact, I have become a bit more obviously ADHD. But I see all of this as a pleasant contrast and I find myself feeling quite fond of these emergent and, to my mind at least, quite endearing traits.

There have also been a couple of days when I forgot to take my little pill in the morning and on those occasions I have felt my eyelids become steadily heavier and heavier as I slowly slide into an ever-more sleepy state as the day has progressed. And then there was the day, just last week in fact, when I forgot to take my medication and slipped downwards into a dark funk of foggy and negative thoughts – that was really not pleasant at all. But then, on the following day, the poem ‘The Hollow Man’ emerged and with it the little nugget of self-knowledge that I think it captures, an interesting reminder that sometimes difficulty and pain unexpectedly leave behind something of real value. Overall, taking medication to help me work with my ADHD has been an overwhelmingly positive experience giving me a great deal more confidence and a real desire to discover all I can about myself and to explore different ways that I can express a little of the supernova of thoughts that is exploding constantly inside my head.

And so here I am… and, apparently, surprisingly, part of what I am has turned out to be a writer of poetry. This was not something I expected, not something I had always wanted to be, not even something that I found myself thinking about over an extended period of time. I just woke up one morning a couple of months ago after a day in which I had struggled immensely – an inward explosion of frustration and rage completely out of proportion to any of the triggers that I might have identified to justify how I felt – and there it was, an image in my head, a three word phrase (‘slough it off’) and suddenly I was writing a poem (a poem? Really?). ‘Metamorphosis’ was born and a metamorphosis was underway.

There is a line in ‘This Charming Man’, one of my favourite songs by the band The Smiths, that contains the phrase: ‘He could have been a poet or he could have been a fool’. I have always enjoyed this phrase but I enjoy it more so now because I have discovered that it is not an either/or. I do not have to be a poet or a fool. I am both!

A final note:
I really have no idea whether there is any merit in these poems. I am sure that some are better than others and I certainly have my own favourites but whether any of them are actually any good is another matter. In the past, I would not have written these poems and I would certainly not have shared them in this way unless I had received a lot of positive feedback about them. Even then, my inner critic would quite likely have put a stop to all of this writing malarkey long before I reached this point – far better to find an excuse not to start than to risk things not being good enough eh? But that was before I wrote ‘Metamorphosis’ or ‘Does It Matter?’ or ‘Poetry’ back in the time when, to be honest, I felt rather lost whereas now I know that ‘I Am Not Lost’ and I have a much better understanding of where I feel that I am ‘Home’.

As I write this, the number of people who have read any of these poems is probably still in single figures and all of those readers are people that know me and so [adopt the voice of ‘old me’ here] they were obviously just being nice, their comments must be biased and I must tell myself that really the opposite of everything they tell me is the real truth etc. But I have had some comments that seem genuinely positive, encouraging and appreciative. In any case, writing these poems has largely been a way of exploring certain aspects of myself for myself as I think/hope ‘Poetry’ makes clear and so whether the poems are any good or whether they are enjoyable to read or whether they do hit the mark is really not the point (and what exactly is the meaning of the word ‘good’ anyway?). It’s just possible that those early readers actually meant what they said and, of course, even if they didn’t ‘It matters not’. If, by sharing my poems, I somehow manage to provide a crumb of comfort, a spark of recognition or a flash of insight that is helpful to, or enjoyed by, a single reader, well that would be a wonderful bonus.

Two days later:
Alas, it seems that I lied, as it turns out that the above passage is not the final note. But I can surely be a little kinder to myself than to brand myself a liar when all that happened was that the passing of time had tricked me out of a memory.

I was out for my morning run and for once this ‘summer’ the sky was an almost cloudless blue and I could feel the warmth of the Sun’s rays on my skin. As I ran, a memory flashed into my head, appearing like a forgotten view momentarily revealed by the action of a sudden unseen gust of wind that flings open a rickety wooden shutter that had been stuck fast across a window. It was the memory of another poem that, given its theme, I am fairly certain that I wrote it in the second half of 1990. I could only recall a few fragments of the poem but in my mind’s eye I could clearly see the single sheet of paper with all the lines neatly handwritten in my best italic script. And I knew exactly where I could find the sheet of paper.

Once home, still immersed in the fresh sweat of my exertions, I went straight upstairs, to dive into the small wooden trunk in which I keep, now mostly unseen, some of the sheet music from my ‘cello playing days and a pile of assorted papers onto which I had scribbled the words and chords of my songs. There it was, exactly as remembered, beautifully written out, the paper delicately crumpled – evidence that it had been screwed tight into a ball but then, perhaps with some instinctive prescience that there was something there to be rescued, carefully flattened and added to the pile. That poem had lain unshared for almost one-third of a century but has, already, been shared with one other. I have added it as the first poem in this compendium, for now it has a home.

I suspect that an inquisitive reader will desire answers to certain questions and having included this re-discovered poem in this compendium I think that it is only fair for me to reveal some answers. Fear and inexperience were ultimately overcome by a combination of dogged persistence and (for once useful) impulsivity. Who I am does not appear to have conflicted with who she wanted to be, even when who I am turns out to be not entirely who I thought I was. And, perhaps most importantly of all, for well in excess of 10,000 days I cannot once recall an argument over what to have for breakfast!

(c) Tim O’Hare, September 2023