My Friends Have Left Me Poem by Gert Strydom

(after John Clare)

My friends have left me,
they do know me not
and at times I am struggling with my sanity
but there are still some words that I have got

while the sense of nothingness
envelops all of my world
and to everything I have a strange aloofness
while I am trying to hold

onto some kind of meaning
as my life under the whip of destiny bends
but it's at the edge of disaster that I am leaning
and it feels as if everything somehow ends

while instinctively I know
over the edge at a time I have got to go

[References: 'I am - yet what I am none cares or knows' by John Clare.]