Poems to Teenagers
Endless Search by Alonzo Lopez
Searching, forever searching.
Looking, but never finding.
Day and night, my eyes roam the world.
Searching, not knowing how to end. This search for myself.
The quest for one’s identity is begun in early infancy even though, I am sure, it is rarely conceived of as such. There are probably few adults who are even cognizant of this sort of search at all through their meagre and worthless lives. No. I am being mean and unfair. Just because someone lives their life in a way I don’t value, does not make it worthless. Or even unhappy. I know many people who are quite content in their obliviousness.
Let me begin again.
When I was in my teenage years I was acutely aware that the life I was leading was meant to be extraordinary. What I didn’t know then—and possibly do not even realise now—is that there is no “meant to be” when it comes to life. It simply is.
It reminds me of a few lines from Alexander Pope’s “An Essay on Man”:
All Nature is but Art, unknown to thee;
All chance, direction, which thou canst not see
All discord, harmony not understood,
All partial evil, universal good:
And, spite of pride, in erring reason’s spite,
One truth is clear, whatever is, is right.
I memorised these lines for my Lit 12 exam. I remember reading them and being blown away by how they were saying so eloquently (and in rhyming couplets, no less!) what I had been thinking in my head as that partially-formed 17 year old but was absolutely unable to get out. Put simply, Pope was saying, “Hey, humans! You may not get it. You may never get it. But it is what it is. And what it is is right. So stop looking for anything more meaningful and just live. Stop worrying that you are missing it because, you know what? You are!”
I am not sure that I have really been able to internalise this message over the years since I memorised those lines. Or, rather, if I have, it has been only sometimes and for fleeting moments at that. Even this endeavour. This putting into words the memories, collections, and recollections of a short life—even this has been begun in an effort, I think, to “find” something. Myself, perhaps, as the poet says? Or, perhaps, an aspect of myself that will once and for all confirm that adolescent delusion of grandeur.
I remember sitting in the hallway of my high school, the final bell long since rung, writing (bad?) poetry in a black hard-cover journal and glancing up every-once-in-a-while to the object of my affection. Hoping she would notice me. Hoping she would see…what? That I was special?
Today, as I walk the halls of the various high schools, I see these kids who are just like I was and I see them for who they are: romantics searching for hidden treasures of understanding and connection.
I see myself.
What you will find below is a poetic contemplation on “self and other” within the context of my teaching practice. I often and implicitly ruminate on what it means to be a “self,” and, in what sense this both forms the “other” and constitutes them as subject (my self the other in this sense). It is precisely this rumination that predicates (some of/much of) my difficulty with my chosen profession. I contain this difficulty within a book of poetry entitled, “poems to teenagers”. Enjoy.
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