The high-backed chair

Oh dear! So Suvrat has posted this poem. It is uncanny that I should see it today. I had written the poem long ago, in 2002 or even before, 2000 or 2001 I think. It is strange that the day I should read it again, six years after I had written it should be a day like this. This was my first poem, my first poem that I ever took seriously.....and I don't remeber the day that I wrote it, nor any specific event that might have led me to feel like this.. But it was more than tinged with religious feelings, a passion that I have not felt for so long that after all these days I am surprised at the intensity of it. The religious undertone, and the person for whom it was written...he with a capital H.....would have been more obvious from the initial title I had thought for the poem, 'Stigmata'. I was obsessed with the idea of stigmata then, but thought that the reason for the torment was purely religious. Although I never saw the conflict as anything other than of a personal nature. Back then I thought it had something to do with all those minutes stolen at the chapel (I cannot even say the word without feeling that it has somehow been tainted by my own Ronald Merrick, my ghost fetish, Christ and so on. Today when I read it and feel the same but in a qualitatively much much different context it makes me think that the reasons for writing it had not been religious ...the same tyranny I feel today, after finishing college, after Masters,...when I'm quieter and hardened in a sense---or so I would like to think. Had I not thought about the poem quite often, I would not have believed that I had written the poem so many years ago, when the circumstances it speaks of are present now. The reference to the high-backed chair almost makes me feel affection for me.....good old me....all those years back I had the same way of putting things the way I felt them. I feel the high backed chair now:) Oh how much I do feel it!But that means that the tyranny originates from within me...no one is to blame:) I think I see the high backed chair, I feel tied and feel the need to break away with so much intensity..none of it comes from the outside, or even if it does I am too bullish to notice, so taken up am I with the inside. Which means.......what I felt six years back has not changed much save in depth here and colour there....so I suppose I shall continue to be like this till the last day.
Love always,
Hia