What Else



It would not be discovered,

This thing called ‘What Else’.

I knew it was there-

Its presence calling, enticing; seizing my attention away from monotony.



A lifetime spent searching for it surely is not wasted?

The failure of outcome, does it matter?

And yet even now sometimes, through it all, the whisper from that place-

The place of What Else.



Through all of lifes game the call is relentless-

Never silent, never sleeping.

As real as the sun, intangible as an apparition

Without a care in the world that it seeks to empty.



I’ve lost my faith in What Else.

She’s mean spirited, insatiable,

Taking all who fall prey to her call, in other words all - not one single soul left behind.

Her curious fabric intertwined with birth, never to leave.



The chasm of my realisation vast,

A huge empty space now of nothingness.

And yet, among the depths of nowhere

Somewhere. After What Else, everything.

Can a poem be seen as too abstract, even though it is describing an insatiable longing for something intangible, unattainable? This poem seems to be about making sense of the indescribable. Even when it is described as real, the object pursued, which itself is only a question, is ‘as real as the sun’; the farthest object in our solar system.
Some interesting phrases in opposition to this emptiness could have been unpacked. ‘away from monotony’ in what context, with what characteristics? ‘Life’s game’. Just a hint, there of something that could be depicted. The ‘call’ swallows up all possibilities.
Only at the end of the poem is there a hint that beyond the alluring ‘what else?’ is everything else, which makes me wonder, Jo, if it is a poem about avoiding the subject that is worth writing about.