Sore Throat

By James Christopher Sheppard

I’m so sick of talking

of writing and verbalising

screaming and shouting

just to explain myself to you.

I want to take pictures

and draw and paint

put together collages of images

to fill my empty days.

Brain disengaged in a way

but awakened to

sounds and sights that fill with delight

the space that once was words.

I want to want

to study and live and love and learn

and I do

yet I don’t hold the reigns tight enough.

I want to learn to relax

and to dance when asked

and to stand at the bar with confidence

and to not feel awkward as I walk through the room.

So it turns out I should have chosen a different path

or perhaps stuck to the original,

but I am not one to pick and stick

if not completely convinced.

I’m so sick of waiting

for something to grab me

and throw me onto the conveyer belt of dreams

and for life to finally begin.

------------------------------

It had been quite sometime since my last update, yet when I tried, all I could put together was this. So yes, in a nutshell, feeling like my degree is pretty much worthless in the sense of getting a decent job in the now as a writer. I keep looking at fellow Kingston University students online portfolios and archives and am blown away. The students that seem to be getting somewhere are the journalism students. Us creative writers alone, don't seem to be half as up on what they are up on. I'm now thinking I should have studied Creative Writing and Journalism instead of English Literature, but we can't change that now. I did love my course, I just hadn't given much thought to the technicalities of employment afterwards. Of course I can chase the freelancer dream, but as we were told in class, you have to have a day job for several years before you can have any hope of living off what you make as a freelance writer. 

Even as a freelance writer, I am barely trained, compared to the journalism students. Their sites are professional and concise, where mine is amateurish. I feel disengaged with writing about myself and what's happening in my life at the moment as I am pretty deflated by it all. As the poem depicts, I am sick of words and trying to piece things together. What I want is to just feel free, and even though I am, I don't posses the ability to embrace that. I don't know, I wrote a poem because it's hard to explain.