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Boredom
Inside my head a crawling worm
Its milliard feet is clumping
Externally the faceless firm
Its vacuous shit is dumping
My mind sits tightened in its shell
Just this side of aching
My thoughts on boredom anguished dwell
Just how much life it's taking
The daily work; the trivial tasks
All done. And some repeated.
'Can this be all?' the worn soul asks
Are hopes and dreams defeated?
A bone deep weariness steals down
Sapping strength and pride
A heartfelt cry for past renown
For work once satisfied.
Sit instead and stare at screen
Long time it held my focus.
It stares back now, no longer keen
To hold my magnum opus.
Breakfast, lunch, a coffee break
The beat of patterned day
No passion left, old embers raked
The heat all drained away.
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Synopsis
This time my inspiration came from a lucid moment when I became aware what it felt like to be bored. Not just the emotion, but the physical feeling the boredom was creating in my head and later in my shoulders, neck and back. A strange tightness - almost a shortness of breath - and a feeling that something unspeakable was crawling around in there with thousands of tiny feet, scratching and bumping over the folds of my brain.
I wrote Boredom in early 2002. The previous three years had been a very frustrating time in my career, if you could call it a career. It certainly hadn't been careering anywhere; barely achieving a snail's pace compared to the high flying aspirations of five years before. The days were filled with trips to the staff restaurant for "breakfast" - an unofficial coffee/toast/muffin break instigated by colleagues and one that I had only recently begun to partake of, for want of anything else to do between 9am and 9:30.
The passion I once felt for the work I did, the pride I had in being able to do it quickly, accurately and effectively, had all but died under the massive weight of boredom and lack of opportunity to contribute. Where once my skills were widely recognised and highly prized, now I sat in an organisational backwater listening to the frightening sound of my knowledge decaying through disuse. The day taken up with a search through newsgroups and web pages, trying to find something interesting to read. Trying to summon up the enthusiasm to work on the mindless trivia and repetitive regurgitation of work already completed in other guises many times over that I had been given in the absence of a real challenge. Trying to come to terms with the worry that, even if I were to be given such a challenge, I would no longer know where to start.
Was it depression? I have clinically depressed friends who describe similar feelings. And worryingly those feelings only came over them when they were confronted with the thing that was depressing them. That was how I felt. Almost incapable - petrified - of taking on the type of technical work at which I normally would excel (but which I felt had left me behind in a sea of new technologies, acronyms and interrelationships) and yet strangely calm and content to while away the hours with inconsequence.
Shortly after I wrote the poem, things took a radical turn for the better.